The exclamation mark was real
Google! With the mark. It stayed for a while, along with the note admitting the index only had about twenty-five million pages, which they were clearly a bit sheepish about. The whole thing lived on a Stanford address before the domain existed.
The tagline was just an instruction: search the web using Google. No slogan, no mission statement, no attempt to sound like anything.
What the dial-up toggle does to you
Turn it on and the page renders the way it actually would have at 56k. Text first, layout shifting under you, images arriving line by line, everything appearing in the wrong order for eight seconds. It’s an accurate reconstruction and it is genuinely infuriating, which is the point.
Everyone who lived through it remembers the waiting as background noise. Nobody remembers it as this bad.
Fake visitor counters
Every site had one. Most of them were lying. The one on this page ticks up while you sit here, which is exactly as meaningful as the originals were.
The CRT option
Scanlines, slight curve, a bit of colour bleed on the edges. It’s overdone deliberately, because nobody’s monitor was actually this bad by 1998, but flat pixels don’t read as old and the fuzzy version does.
Flip between the two
The switch puts the current design next to the old one. What’s striking isn’t how much changed, it’s how little the middle of the page did. Logo, box, two buttons. Everything google 1998 got wrong was around the edges.
Other things that mess with the page itself
Google mirror reverses the layout instead of ageing it. Google terminal strips it back further than 1998 did, to a plain command line. Google askew just tilts it and says nothing.
Everything else: google easter eggs.
