It was fifteen years ago this month that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated their search engine Google as a private limited company after initially developing it as Stanford PhD students. It only took them a few years to become the dominant web search engine out there. Some of its predecessors have disappeared (remember Alta Vista?), others have managed to hang on to a significant market share (Yahoo!). But today Google is, without question, the boss of them all.

Before 'to Google' became a commonly used verb, and a decade before Android and Chrome, Google's origins were humble. Now, if you search for 'Google in 1998' you're presented with a snapshot of the site as a youngster.

The interface hasn't changed a lot, but the scale certainly has: googling Google returned 234,000 results in 1998, whereas the same search today returns over 9 billion. No wonder that urban legend about typing Google into Google still persists...

It's only a brief glance back to a simpler, more innocent Internet. Those interested in diving back in time a little further can always stop by archive.org's Wayback Machine. The public domain site has taken snapshots of the web at regular intervals and stored them for our perusal and amusement (as well as historical documentation for future generations).

So, what exactly did the Newstalk homepage look like back in 2003, a year after the station started? Times have changed, that's for sure...

(Main image: Flickr. Newstalk 2003 image via Wayback Machine)