Ever wonder what your first ever google search term was? Just how many google searches have you performed in your lifetime anyway?
I was pondering whether to purge my google search history periodically via the My Activity service, then I proceeded to go down the rabbit hole of trying to find the answers to these questions.
Now we all know Google was formed out of a garage and officially incorporated as a company in 1998, but most of us would not have come across the magical tool until the year 2000. Back then, services like Lycos, Yahoo and AltaVista ruled the roost in internet search land.
It turns out though, that my first ever recorded search term didn’t occur til 13 May 2006 and it was - “gnarls barkley crazy”
Other search terms later that week included - “weezer discography” and “ray lamontagne crazy” - which is understandable as I ran a music blog at the time.
This is also likely the period when I started searching as a logged on Google user. Being an archivist myself, deep down inside I think I knew I wanted to write a blog post like this some 14 and a half years later…
As for the second question of how many google searches ever - that took a little more digging, which may or may not involve another blog post on how I did it. Let’s just say there was a json to csv conversion and a ‘days calculator’ involved.
The bottom line is that in the time between 13 May 2006 and 23 December 2020, I had accumulated a whopping 42,115 queries on google.com, at an average of 7.89 a day over 5339 days.
I do now have a history over 42k search terms in a spreadsheet. What could I possibly do with that dataset? Watch this space.
