Google 2001 v. Google 2008

In honour of their 10th birthday Google brought back their oldest available index a couple of days ago: Google 2001. This provides a great opportunity for looking at how the web has changed, especially the growth of certain terms in comparison to others.

As a webometrician, the obvious choice is to see how 'webometrics' has grown. However with changes in the index size the results are only meaningful in comparison to another result. In this case I have decided on 'Mike Thelwall', the hyper-productive author of over 100 papers in the field, who, luckily, also has an unusual name.


Whilst there were a similar number of documents at the start, and both have grown at an extremely fast rate, webometrics has grown at the faster rate. Scientific proof that there is more to webometrics than Mike Thelwall!

It would be nice if Google opened up some other indexes so that more points to the graph could be added.