[gmurphy]

Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined the team for the first ten years wanted to redesign history and felt it could've been a huge differentiator. We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever.

In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.

[MichaelZuo]

> We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever.

That would still be a real innovation over the current 90 day retention maximum.

[yencabulator]

Unfortunately, today's version of that is "Web & App Activity", sent to Google servers with the Terms of Service allowing it to be used for ad targeting and what not.

(And I think the real innovation would be showing the branching, not mangling everything into a linear history. But it's harder to show and use well, so it doesn't happen. Very much the same story as editor undo/redo.)