On this day in 1999...

[AllentownJake]

Lou Dobbs was a respected, middle-of-the-road journalist.

The prospect of achieving Middle East peace seemed imminent.

Beltway pundits believed Al Gore and George W. Bush were centrists who would govern similarly.

You could meet your loved ones at their arrival gate.

There were more than 2 million Christians living in Iraq.

Osama bin Laden was living with his family in a compound in Kandahar.

China's GDP was $1.4 trillion, half of Germany's.

Israel still had troops in Lebanon.

Nobody had ever heard of Somali pirates.

Something called Inktomi was the world's largest search engine.

Everybody was clamoring for the new file-sharing program Napster.

We worried Y2K would bring the global banking infrastructure to its knees.

Illinois State Senator Barack Obama campaigned for a spot in the House of Representatives.

First Lady Hillary Clinton campaigned for a spot in the Senate.

Wasilla, Alaska, Mayor Sarah Palin considered running for state-wide office.

India had fewer than a billion citizens.

Strongman Slobodan Milosevic still ruled in Yugoslavia.

The human genome had not yet been mapped.

The Concorde flew between Paris and New York.

Alan Greenspan was widely heralded as the world's greatest financial thinker.

Boris Yeltsin was preparing to step down and make way for the young pragmatist Vladimir Putin.

The Dow Jones closed at 11,484. (Today, it's at 10,545.)

The United States had a record federal budget surplus.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/29/food_for_thought

[THUNDER HANDS]

1. what the heck is Inktomi?

I was using google back in 1997.

[AllentownJake]

2. It's Yahoo now they bought them in 2002 after the dot.com bubble

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inktomi_Corporation

[Hissyspit]

10. I think I was using Altavista mostly, can't remember when I first used Google. Maybe around 1999.

[ThatsMyBarack]

3. Gas was $1.25....

Or less.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

4. Heil to Herr Rove

for carrying out the destructive mandates of his puppet-string wielding masters.

[Democrats_win]

5. You forgot one: 1999 was a very good year for me.

I suspect that a lot of Americans would say that.

[AllentownJake]

6. I was a sophmore in college

I was very happy.

[lunamagica]

9. Yes. 1999 was infinietly better than 2009 for me n/t

[lunamagica]

7. I fondly remember Inktomi

Bidding on search terms was really cheap on Inktomi, like 0.01 You could get good quality traffic to little websites for really cheap.

Those days are gone. Now you have to have a monster site with a budget to match to buy any quality traffic


I miss those days, when the homebound could make a some money.

[endless october]

8. i had just graduated grad school and started my first job.

hard to believe that's been ten years ago.