In honor of its 10th birthday, Google has recreated and made available its oldest available index for your searching amusement, from January 2001. The 2001 index contains 1,326,920,000 fully searchable web pages, and is available at http://www.google.com/search2001.html (or just click here). Be prepared to waste invest a good bit of time trying out your favorite and most creative searches to see how much things have changed in just 7 years.

For instance, it seems impossible now that a Google search for "Sarbanes Oxley," which today provides 6,810,000 search results, could ever result in zero hits but the legislation didn't even exist back then.

Other searches barely moving the needle back in 2001 include:

"Henry Paulson" (510 hits in 2001, most of which related to other Henry Paulsons vs. 5,590,000 in 2008);

"Ben Bernanke" (873 hits in 2001 about the then-Princeton University Economics professor vs. 5,340,000 hits in 2008);

"Barack Obama" (671 hits in 2001 vs. 76,400,000 in 2008); and

"Sarah Palin" (zero hits in 2001 vs. 20,000,000 in 2008).

Try out Google 2001 and let us know of any interesting financial or compliance-related search results in the Comments section below.