Google, on its 10th anniversary, has brought back its oldest available indexes to show how much the Internet has changed in that relatively short time.
Here’s a “Route 66” search, circa 2001, which turned up a “mere” 110,000 results. A number of Web sites listed no longer exist, and many more had not yet been created.
Swa Frantzen’s Historic66.com, which remains the oldest Internet site on Route 66, was a netvision.be site and can be seen here from that era. Then, as it is now, it was the No. 1 Mother Road site.
Nowadays, if you type in “Route 66” into a Google search, you get more than 10 million results.
That really brings back some memories. I recall that the “big three” when I started looking in 1999 were Swa’s, the Federation site, and exmachina.net. The first two are still going strong but exmachina left the web some time back and I was happy to see a partial archive of it in the Google flashback. The site was much more than a one book advertisement but it did seem to exist primarily to market “A Guidebook to the Mother Road” by Moore & Grauwels. I used the book on my 1999 trip and believe I bought it through the exmachina website. I’ve always assumed the Bob Moore ran the site but I don’t actually know that.