Now and Then
Google does a lot of interesting things for its users, trying to involve and interest us more and more. Yesterday, it made its first ever search index (Jan 2001) available to the public as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations. Like a wayback or internet archive machine, only, way faster.
Here are the results of a few keywords of our interest. I’ll let the numbers do the talking.
| Keyword | 2001 Web | 2008 Web | Increase |
| Adobe | 4.14M | 325M | 7,850% |
| Apple | 5.79M | 502M | 8,670% |
| 3.78M | 2,660M | 70,370% | |
| Microsoft | 15.7M | 767M | 4,885% |
| Sun | 21.9M | 890M | 4,064% |
| Yahoo! | 21.2M | 2,360M | 11,132% |
| ActionScript | 20,800 | 18.7M | 89,904% |
| Beautiful Web | 3.64M | 230M | 6,319% |
| Flash | 6.66M | 1,300M | 19,520% |
| Geoweb | 25,200 | 1.48M | 5,873% |
| Mobile | 9.11M | 1,220M | 13,392% |
| RIA | 0.316M | 30.5M | 9,652% |
| Rich Internet Application | 0.473M | 19.2M | 4,059% |
The results for RIA and Rich Internet Application may not reflect what we are looking for because these as a concept haven’t yet entered mainstream though some of the technologies being used for them are becoming a part of every Internet user’s vocabulary.
Some words like iPhone and Silverlight didn’t even exist in the way we know today.
| Keyword | Year | 2008 Web |
| AIR | 2008 | 8.2M |
| AJAX | 2005 | 101M |
| Flex | 2004 | 85.4M |
| iPhone | 2007 | 328M |
| JavaFX | 2007 | 1.52M |
| Silverlight | 2007 | 17.4M |
If only we had more such indexes available, at least an index a year, we might be able to trace the history and growth of RIA with a more clear-cut timeline.
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