What this is
Page One is a small experiment. Type a name, place or word, and it returns the earliest article in the Guardian's online archive that mentions it.
Why
Every name in the news was unfamiliar at some point. Page One started as a way to find that first article without scrolling through the Guardian's archive by hand.
How it works
Each search calls the Guardian's public Open Platform API, ordered oldest first, and limited to article body, headline and byline. Without that last restriction, modern tags applied to old pieces can surface as false matches (an 1874 article tagged "Vladimir Putin" by a present-day archivist, for instance).
The sparkline counts how many times the term has appeared each year since it first did. Results are cached on Cloudflare's edge, so most queries return instantly.
Caveats
"First mention" means the earliest article in the Guardian's digital archive, which is large but not exhaustive. Older or more obscure entries may be missing.
Page One is not affiliated with The Guardian.