Look at what is not there
No pictures. No panel down the side. No tabs, no chips, no autocomplete. A serif face because nobody had decided what a search engine should look like yet, a category list because directories were still how people found things, and an exclamation mark after the name.
It is a working page, not a picture of one. Type in it and results come back in the old shape.
The kilobytes
Under every result there is a file size. In 1998 that number told you whether the page was worth the wait, and it is the single most dated thing on the layout, more than the typeface and more than the beta label. Nobody has published a page weight next to a link in twenty years.
Before it had the name
The project was called BackRub, after the way it read links between pages. It became Google in 1997 and looked like this a year later, running out of a university department with an index in the tens of millions rather than the trillions.
Old google, google 1998, google in1998, google 1998 trick, all the same page. The other thing that survived from that era untouched is the pagination at goooooooooogle. If you want less layout still, there is google terminal.
