Here’s where you’ll find the newest Google search features and tips and tricks to help you become a search master. If you want to totally nerd-out, watch a search story or check out some other fun projects we’ve been working on in our playground.
7/26/12
Handwrite is a fun and easy new way to search on your smartphone or tablet. This beta feature lets you write your search with a finger right on the Google homepage.
5/16/12
The next frontier of Search is to understand real-world things and their connections. So we're building a Knowledge Graph, the technology that helps you get smarter answers to jump start your discovery.
2/23/12
Find that great image you're looking for or explore a topic through pictures with related search previews. You'll find them along the top of your image search results.
Learn about Google by exploring innovations, features and milestones in Search since our founding in 1997.
9/4/97
Larry and Sergey, Stanford computer science grad students who have collaborated for the past year on a search engine hosted on Stanford servers called BackRub, decide to rename their search engine. After some brainstorming, they go with Google—a play on the word “googol”—a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.
8/30/98
The tradition of homepage doodles is born when Larry and Sergey incorporate the iconic Burning Man into the Google logo before heading to the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
5/9/00
Acting on our mission to organize the world's information, we launch Google.com in 10 additional languages: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
6/26/00
Google ushers in a new millennium, century, decade, and web search era by becoming the world's largest web search index.
9/12/00
Google begins offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing our total number of supported languages to 15. But (still!) no Klingon.
The release of the browser plug-in Google Toolbar makes it possible to do Google searches without going to our homepage. In other words, now you can use Google across the web without visiting Google.com by simply downloading our Google Toolbar and tucking it in your browser.
3/27/01
Not content with the slow process of translating our Google interface one language at a time into the innumerable tongues spoken around the world, Google implements a translation console that allows users to help speed the process. Now any Googler can volunteer to translate part or all of our pages into any one of more than 100 different languages. Already, volunteers have converted Google into Catalan, Afrikaans, Russian and Czech, with more languages being added on a weekly basis. As of this day, Google.com is available in 26 languages.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a million pictures? Or to be more precise 250 million pictures? Google Image Search (beta version) launches and is the most comprehensive way to search for images on the Web. Plus, it's just as easy to use as Google's other Web search services.
12/11/01
The Google web index size grows to 3 billion web documents, which at the time seems like a lot of web documents.
We capture the spirit of 2001 based on the aggregation of billions of Google search queries. Fielding more than 150 million queries per day, we offer the top 10 trending queries:
Extra! Extra! Google News launches, providing breaking stories culled from approximately 4,000 news sources worldwide. Stories are automatically arranged into categories, and topics are updated throughout the day, so it's easy to watch news unfold each time you visit.
We capture the spirit of 2002 with our Year-End Zeitgeist, which offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world. Here are the top 10 gaining queries of the year:
We launch Froogle (now Product Search), our product search service, which carries Google's emphasis on objective, unbiased results into the realm of online shopping. Froogle searches through millions of relevant websites to help users quickly find whatever they're hankering for, pinpointing sites that offer the specific product they seek. We decide early on that Google will never sell its search results, so users always know their results are relevant, not bought-and-paid-for.
After more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year, we release the 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist, which offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends. Here are the ten most popular queries of the year:
2/17/04
Our search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images.
4/1/04
We test a preview release of Gmail, a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to 8 billion bits of information—the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user. The inspiration for Gmail comes from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services.
10/7/04
OMG—Google SMS (short message service) launches, giving you a handy way to get a listing for a nearby restaurant, find the definition of a word, look up the price of a product, or find an area or zip code. You can even use Google SMS to calculate a tip. If your phone is enabled for text messages, you can send your query to the 5-digit US shortcode: 46645 (GOOGL on most phones). Your query results are then sent as text messages, not links.
The beta version of Google Scholar lets academics search scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports -- all for free. At Google, we've benefited much from academic research. This is one of the ways we're giving back to the research community. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of giants.
Google Desktop Search brings Google search technology to the final data frontier: your own cluttered hard drive. This small (700k) application is designed help you find all kinds of files on your hard drive, including Office files, email, AIM chats, and PDFs, plus music, images, video, and more.
11/10/04
We announce that our index of web pages has reached 8 billion. It seems like a lot at the time.
The world's books, preserved forever, courtesy of the Google Print Program (since renamed Google Book Search). Today, we announce digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, and Oxford, plus the New York Public Library. Our goal: To make the world of books more discoverable for a new generation. By working with libraries and publishers, we now have access to millions of books, including many unique volumes that haven't been read in years and thousands of out-of-print books.
Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and trends. Here are the top ten most popular queries:
We launch Google Video, a product that enables you to search an index of transcripts from recent TV programs. At this point it's just an early-stage beta product: You only see stills and text snippets from shows that match your search terms, and you can only search shows from a few channels, dating back to December, 2004. But we'll be steadily improving Google Video in the months to come, so as they say in the TV biz, stay tuned.
2/7/05
A huge milestone on this day, as Google Image Search announces that we've reached 1.1 billion images indexed, not all of them of cats.
Google Labs releases our personalized homepage (now called iGoogle), which lets you shape the Internet the way you want it (more or less), by adding news headlines, weather, and other features to the Google homepage. A single mouseclick lets you switch back to the "classic" Google look.
Say what? Google Translate scores well in the U.S. government’s 2005 machine translation evaluation—and as later dates in this timeline will attest, the translation team is just getting started.
This blogging thing has clearly taken off—but how do you find what bloggers are writing about? Introducing Google Blog Search, which delivers Google-fast search results across blogs in many languages, regardless of where they are hosted or written. You can search by topic, URL, keywords, or you can restrict your search to specific blogs or date ranges.
Billions of Google searches. One year. Zeitgeist distills the former into a snapshot of the latter. Here are the top ten trending searches:
We help you make sense of your dollars by offering quick and easy access to business and financial information about public and private companies and mutual funds. Google Finance includes interactive charts; company search by name or ticker symbol; stories grouped by topic from Google News; timely blog posts from Google Blog Search; on-topic discussion groups; and easy-to-use portfolios for tracking your financial information.
It's all about you. With Google Trends, you can gauge the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
Better than Google? Why not? The launch of the Google Custom Search Engine gives bloggers and website owners the ability to create a search engine tailored to their own, and their users', specific interests.
With the beta release of Google Patent Search, you can learn the story behind everyday products such as adhesive tape and contact lenses, or find out about thousands of obscure inventions you probably never knew existed. Google Patent lets you search the full text and illustrations of more than 7 million U.S. patents.
What did 2006 mean? Zeitgeist takes a crack at answering that question by studying the year's Google search queries. Here are the top searches of 2006:
5/16/07
All together now. At our Searchology event, we announce that we're one step closer to universal search after we create a way to search across all content sources—web, images, news, maps, local, video, books—and deliver integrated results ranked in order of relevance.
We capture the spirit of 2007 based on the aggregation of billions of Google search queries. Here are the ten fastest rising queries in the US:
Google Translate now brings the miracle of instant online translation to Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish, for a total of 23 supported languages. Odlično!
5/21/08
Millions of online voters decide that sixth grader Grace Moon from Castro Valley, California submitted the best doodle for this year's Doodle 4 Google Contest.
The launch of Google Site Search allows website owners to enable Google-powered searches on their own sites.
We launch a new service called Knol that makes it much easier for knowledgable experts to write and share information on the web. Authors can post authoritative articles (a.k.a. knols) on a subject, then share the knowledge with everyone. Each knol identifies an author or group of authors, so readers can clearly see who wrote it and their credentials, as well as comment, rate, or review the knol. Using a new feature called "moderated collaboration," readers can even contribute to the knol directly. The author can then decide whether to take the suggestions into account.
7/25/08
Just how big is the web? We announce that our indexing system for processing links shows that Google now counts 1 trillion unique URLs, with the number of individual web pages growing by several billion pages per day.
8/25/08
We launch Google Suggest, which helps you formulate search queries and reduce spelling errors and keystrokes, saving Internet users thousands of typing hours—one split-second suggestion at a time.
We release Google Chrome, a new open-source web browser. Fast and secure, it lets you access your favorite Google services—Gmail, Google Maps and Google Docs—more easily than ever before. Google Chrome offers new unique features too, such as a single box for web addresses and searches, a simplified download manager, and an interface to maximize your browsing experience.
9/2/08
Time flies -- Google’s 10th birthday.
As part of our 10th birthday celebration, we launch Project 10^100 (that’s “ten to the hundredth”), a call for ideas designed to help as many people as possible, and a program to bring the best of those ideas to life. We commit $10 million to jumpstart these projects and invite you to vote for your favorite ideas.
We release the top trending queries that capture the spirit of 2008:
With the addition of Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician, we announce that Google Translate is now capable of automatic translation between 41 languages that together cover 98% of the languages read by Internet users.
We release Google Profiles, which gives you the ability to better control what others find when they search for you. Profiles appear at the bottom of our U.S. search pages when people search by name.
5/12/09
Can web search be better and more personalized? Always. That's why we launch Search Options, a tool panel to the left of search results that gives you more sophisticated control over your results.
5/20/09
Thousands of schoolchildren send in submissions. More than 6 million online votes are cast. And Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader from San Antonio, Texas, wins the 2009 Doodle 4 Google Contest.
What? Google Translate didn't support Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh or Yiddish? Well, it does now.
10/26/09
Social Search, a new experiment in Google Labs, enriches your Google search results with relevant public content from your friends and contacts, conveniently highlighted for you at the bottom of your search results.
The new Google Dashboard provides transparency and gives you greater oversight on your Google-related data and information. Dashboard summarizes data for each product you use and provides you with direct links so you can control your personal information and settings—all in one convenient and secure place.
What was 2009 about? This year's Zeitgeist captures the spirit of billions of Google search queries. Here are the fastest rising queries of the year:
We launch Google Goggles, a new visual search application for Android phones that lets you search the web by taking a picture, instead of typing in words. Shoot a photo of a landmark, sign, logo, book cover, or work of art to get matching search results for your image. For business information, just point your phone at a store, and Goggles shows you the name of the business, using the phone's GPS and compass.
Our new Realtime Search feature keeps your search results up to the minute with live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter, as well as news headlines and blog posts published just seconds before your search.
1/4/10
In honor of Sir Isaac Newton's 368th birthday, we produce our first interactive Doodle.
2/7/10
We release our first ever Super Bowl ad, which tells a love story through search terms. This is one of many videos made to celebrate the human quests behind search.
4/1/10
For April Fool‘s Day, we change our name to Topeka—a tribute to Topeka, Kansas, which changed its name to Google as part of an effort to bring our experimental fiber network to that city.
5/5/10
We roll out a fresh look for our search results page, with a new left-hand panel that brings together the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Now you can quickly jump between different types of results, such as Books, Images, and News, or narrow down results by time or topic. The new “Something different” feature at the bottom of the left-hand panel helps you find other topics related to your query.
5/21/10
In celebration of PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, we release our first-ever playable doodle, complete with all 256 levels of dot-chomping fun and Ms. PAC-MAN. It’s so popular, we decide to give it a permanent home.
5/26/10
After more than 33,000 student submissions and millions of online votes, we proudly announce that third grader Makenzie Melton from El Dorado Springs, Missouri wins the 2010 Doodle For Google Contest.
We launch Google.com homepage personalization, allowing you to customize your background image.
6/8/10
We launch Caffeine, our new indexing system, which provides 50-percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and is the largest collection of web content we‘ve ever offered.
We give Realtime Search a new stand-alone homepage, along with more tools for exploring and refining real-time results.
9/4/10
Our interactive doodle commemorates the 25th Anniversary of the Buckyball.
9/6/10
Foreshadowing the Google Instant launch, we release this doodle which is fast, fun and interactive: just the way we think search should be!
We launch Google Instant, a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. Now, you don’t have to finish typing your full search term or even press “Search” to get results. You can use the suggested wording as feedback to help you formulate better search terms and adapt your search on the fly until the results match what you want.
Our interactive transparency report lets you see government inquiries we've received about users, as well as requests to take down or censor content.
10/9/10
Imagine this: an animated doodle celebrating John Lennon's 70th birthday.
John Lennon, Norman Rockwell, Isaac Newton and now you. When you include your birthday in your Google profile, the Google homepage will display a doodle just for you on your special day (just be sure to sign in).
10/27/10
We launch Place Search, a new kind of local search that organizes the world’s information around places. Now when you search for local information, you see a list of specific places marked with red pins, so you can easily decide where to go. Place Search also offers more relevant links on a single results page and provides links to other pages for more information—helping you find the place you’re looking for faster.
11/9/10
We launch Instant Previews, a visual preview of search results that helps you quickly choose the right one by displaying a web snapshot of each option with text call-outs highlighting your search term on the page. By clicking once on the magnifying glass in your results, you see an instant preview of that web page. After you activate Instant Previews, you can hover over any other result to see a different preview.
We shoot, we score with the NBA.com—providing real-time game scores, schedules, standings, links to live updates, game previews, and recaps—all within your search results.
12/3/10
Place Search goes mobile, allowing you to search for [museums new york city] on your smartphone and get web results for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with comments and reviews—all neatly organized in one cluster.
We open the Chrome Web Store, an online marketplace where you can discover thousands of apps, extensions and themes for Google Chrome. Inside, you can search or browse through different categories and individual item pages, as well as read and contribute reviews and ratings. If you use multiple computers, you can synchronize your apps, extensions and themes across all your computers with browser sync.
We capture the spirit of 2010 by aggregating billions of Google search queries. Explore Trends, Events and a 2010 recap video. Here are the top ten fastest rising searches:
12/10/10
In an effort to offer lightning-fast web search results to everyone, we release a beta version of Google Instant on mobile in more than 28 languages and 40 countries worldwide.
2/17/11
We announce updates to Social Search: When signed in to your Google account, you can now see results and shared links from people you’re connected to on Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, and other publicly available sites—blended through the search results page. The names and profile photos of the people who shared or published this information appear underneath the results.
We launch Recipe view so you can tailor your search results to show only recipes, then use clearly marked ratings, ingredients, and pictures to choose the right one. You can also search for specific recipes like [chocolate chip cookies], more open-ended topics like [strawberry], or even find recipes for a holiday or event, like [cinco de mayo]. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link in the left-hand panel of the search results page.
We give Google Profiles a new look and feel, making it even easier for you to control and enrich your public profile. By going to profiles.google.com, you can create a profile that best represents the way you want to be seen by the world.
3/8/11
We launch Instant Previews on Mobile. Similar to the desktop version of Instant Previews, it allows you to visually compare search results from webpage snapshots, making it easier to choose the right result faster.
We introduce the +1 button, which is shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "check this out." Click the +1 button to help friends, contacts, and the rest of the web find the best stuff in Google search.+1's can also help you by showing you the right recommendations on topics you’re interested in, right when you want them—in your search results.
4/15/11
In honor of Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin's 122nd birthday, we create our first-ever live action video doodle.
We allow users to sort by subject in Google Images, so you can not just browse topics visually but find the precise image you're looking fo by clicking Sort by subject in the left-hand panel to instantly organize results.
6/9/11
Practice your online guitar skills with this interactive doodle.
We introduce Instant Pages, a new feature to help users get to their desired search results even faster--in some cases even instantly! The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we're very confident about which result is the best answer for your search.
We introduce voice search for the first time on computers. Instead of typing, you can click the microphone icon to speak your search and find whatever you're looking for. Anything you’re wondering about, whether it’s the weather, movie times, or something you know how to say but not how to spell like bolognese mozzarella recipe - if you can say it, you can search it.
We introduce the ability to search by image. Now, you can use both your own photos and images from the web to begin your search on Google. When you search by image, you’ll see results that show you where that image, and similar images, appear on the web. We'll show you to webpages that contain that image, or find the same image in different sizes or resolutions.
We launch Flight Search, a new tool to explore travel options and plan your trip. With Flight Search you can see an easy-to-scan list of convenient flights. Not sure where you want to travel? Flight Search can help you explore your travel options and destinations. Select a departure city and you can surf around the map to find ticket options for various destinations. Flight Search will also help you see what dates will get you low prices.
We introduce related people and pages in search, allowing you to both discover people and brands related to your search and connect by adding them to your circles.
As part of Search plus Your World, we launch profiles in search, a feature which allows you to find people faster by seeing their Google profile appear right as you type their name in search. By creating a Google profile and making it visible in search, you give Google the ability to surface the most relevant content about you.
We launch personal results as a feature of Search plus Your World. With personal results, you'll see relevant tips, photos, and posts from your friends right alongside results from the web. Personal results are marked with an icon so you know they're just for you. Because these results are personal and private, you'll need to be signed in to Google to see them.
We announce the first feature powered by the Knowledge Graph, which is our huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they're related to one another. The Knowledge Graph powers improvements to Search, helping you get smarter answers and jump start your discovery.
We launch Handwrite, a beta feature that provides a fun and easy new way to search on Google from your tablet or smartphone- just write the search with your finger! With Handwrite can be activated from your mobile search settings.
Sir Isaac Newton's Birthday
Parisian Love
Topeka
Refreshed look for Search Results
PAC-MAN Doodle
Doodle 4 Google 2010
Personalize Google.com
Caffeine
Realtime Search
Buckyball Doodle
Particle Doodle
Google Instant
Transparency Report
John Lennon Doodle
Happy birthday to you!
Place Search
Instant Previews
NBA Live Results
Place Search on mobile
Chrome Web Store
Zeitgeist 2010
Google Instant for mobile
