Google

On September 15, 1997 – twenty years ago to the day – the Google.com domain name was first registered. It looks like Google.com was registered at Network Solutions, but interestingly, it is now registered at MarkMonitor. It is a bit surprising the company hasn’t transferred it to Google Domains, the domain name registrar owned and operated by Google.

Here is a graphic with the current Whois record for Google.com provided by DomainTools:

If you want to see how the Google.com homepage looked over the years, you can have a look at Archive.org.

It’s pretty neat to think that the hub of the entire Internet was created twenty years ago today. At just 20 years old, Google.com isn’t even close to some of the oldest domain names in existence, which pre-date it by over a decade!

Someday, I bet you will see this question in a trivia game and you will know the answer to: “when was Google.com registered?“

Before this morning, I was under the impression that Google uses the age of a domain name as one of the (many) ways it determines a website’s position in its search results. I thought that developing a domain name that has been registered for many years could be helpful in getting a higher search engine ranking.

Apparently, I was mistaken in thinking this.

In a tweet on Wednesday, John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, answered a question that was posed to him about domain age by another Twitter user:

@_newsbulletin @methode no

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) April 12, 2017

Mueller provided a