Google’s Index for Gourmet Food Since 2001

For Google’s birthday, they created a replication of their search engine back in 2001, which can be seen here: http://www.google.com/search2001

It is really cool because you can do searches to see exactly what sites were indexed 7 years ago. I did a search for ‘gourmet food’ which yielded 959,000 results at that time. Any guesses how many results there are now for the same search? 35,900,000. Yes, nearly thirty-five million more results today than 7 years ago. Just goes to show: a) how much the internet in general has grown, and b) just how big the gourmet food industry has become (especially online) since 2001.

Companies that got started back then (like iGourmet.com and GourmetFoodMall.com) sure had some great foresight and are obviously reaping the benefits now - while everyone else is hopping on the bandwagon they started (I wasn’t in the industry then either, so I guess that applies to me, I must admit). Hats off to the founders of those companies, Spencer Chesman and Andy Restivo.