Retro-Google

2006-08-22

Purely by accident, I discovered this little bug on Google: go to google.com/wibble (or any other invalid URL). The 404 page that appears has an ancient logo. Judging from Google’s logo history, it’s pre-1999.

Is this really a mistake, or is it a feature? I can’t believe I’m the first to notice this. It’s cute, anyway…

Comments

That's true: in fact, looking at the source, it has none at all - no CSS, zip. Very cunning.

— andrewferrier 2006-08-29 20:57

No you're not the first one to notice. My guess is that it's by design - it's not a picture but simply coloured text ant it seems pretty neat for an error page to not have any "external dependencies".

— Mårten Gustafson 2006-08-29 20:42