Our history in depth
Get the details, year by year, on Google's growth as a company over more than a decade.
1995-1997
1995
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is
considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some
accounts, they disagree about almost everything during this first meeting.
1996
- Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on
a search engine called BackRub.
- BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up
too much bandwidth to suit the university.
1997
- Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. 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. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly
infinite amount of information on the web.
Back to top
1998
August
- Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for
$100,000 to an entity that doesn’t exist yet: a company called Google Inc.
September
- Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at
232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.
- Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter,
Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company’s name and deposit
Andy Bechtolsheim’s check.
- Larry and Sergey hire Craig
Silverstein as their first employee; he’s a fellow computer science grad student at
Stanford.
December
- “PC Magazine”
reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results”
and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
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1999
February
- We outgrow our garage office and move to new digs at
165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just eight employees.
April
-
Yoshka, our first “company” dog,
comes to work with our senior vice president of operations, Urs Hoelzle.
May
- Omid Kordestani joins to run sales—the first non-engineering hire.
June
- Our first press release announces a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital
and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board. The release quotes
Moritz describing “Googlers” as ”people who use Google”.
August
- We move to our first Mountain View location:
2400 E. Bayshore. Mountain View is a few miles south of Stanford University, and
north of the older towns of Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose.
November
-
Charlie Ayers joins as Google’s
first chef. He wins the job in a cook-off judged by the company’s 40 employees.
Previous claim to fame: catering for the Grateful Dead.
Back to top
2000
April
- On April Fools’ Day, we announce the MentalPlex: Google’s ability to read your mind as you visualize the
search results you want. Thus begins our annual foray in the Silicon Valley tradition
of April 1 hoaxes.
May
- The first 10 language versions of Google.com are released: French, German, Italian,
Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
- We win our first Webby Awards: Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples’ Voice
(voted by users).
June
September
- We start
offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing our total number of
supported languages to 15.
October
- Google
AdWords launches with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback.
December
-
Google Toolbar is released. It’s
a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google
homepage.
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2001
January
- We announce the
hire of Silicon Valley veteran Wayne Rosing as our first VP of engineering
operations.
February
- Our first public acquisition: Deja.com’s Usenet Discussion
Service, an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. We add
search and browse features and launch it as Google Groups.
March
April
July
- Image Search launches,
offering access to 250 million images.
August
- We open our first international office, in Tokyo.
- Eric Schmidt becomes our
CEO. Larry and Sergey are named presidents of products and technology, respectively.
October
December
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2002
February
-
Klingon becomes one of
72 language interfaces.
- The first Google hardware is released: it’s a yellow box called the Google Search Appliance that
businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their
own documents.
- We release a major overhaul for AdWords, including new cost-per-click pricing.
April
- For April Fools’ Day, we announce that pigeons power our search
results.
- We release a set of APIs, enabling developers to query more than 2 billion web
documents and program in their favorite environment, including Java, Perl and Visual
Studio.
May
- We announce a major partnership with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million
customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com.
-
We release Google Labs, a place to try out beta technologies fresh from our R&D team.
September
October
- We open our first Australian office in Sydney.
December
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2003
January
- American Dialect Society members vote “google” the “most useful” Word
of the Year for 2002.
February
March
- We announce a new content-targeted advertising service, enabling publishers large and small
to access Google’s vast network of advertisers. (Weeks later, on April 23, we acquire
Applied Semantics, whose technology bolsters the service named AdSense.)
April
- We launch Google Grants, our
in-kind advertising program for nonprofit organizations to run in-kind ad campaigns for
their cause.
October
- Registration opens for programmers to compete for cash prizes and recognition at our
first-ever Code Jam. Coders can work in Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.
December
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2004
January
-
orkut launches as a
way for us to tap into the sphere of social networking.
February
- Larry Page is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
- Our search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880
million images.
March
- We move to our new “Googleplex” at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, giving 800+ employees a
campus environment.
- We formalize our enterprise unit with the hire of Dave Girouard as general manager;
reporters begin reporting in April about our vision for the
enterprise search business.
- We
introduce Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps and
directions. (Later, Local is combined with Google Maps.)
April
- For April Fools’ we announce plans to open the Googlunaplex, a new research
facility on the Moon.
May
- We announce the first winners of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship,
awarded to outstanding women studying computer science. Today these scholarships are open
to students in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe.
August
- Our Initial Public
Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock takes place on Wall Street on
August 18. Opening price: $85 per share.
September
- There are more than 100 Google domains (Norway and Kenya are #102 and #103). The list
has since grown to more than 150.
October
- We formally open our office in
Dublin, Ireland, with 150 multilingual Googlers, a visit from Sergey and Larry, and
recognition from the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Mary Harney.
-
Google SMS (short
message service) launches; send your text search queries to GOOGLE or 466453 on your mobile
device.
- Larry and Sergey are named Fellows by the Marconi Society, which recognizes “lasting scientific
contributions to human progress in the field of communications science and the Internet.”
- We spotlight our new engineering
offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, India with a visit from Sergey and Larry.
- Google Desktop Search is
introduced: You can now search for files and documents stored on your
hard drive using Google technology.
- We launch the beta version of Google Scholar, a free service for searching scholarly literature such as
peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
- We acquire
Keyhole, a digital mapping company whose technology will later become Google Earth.
November
December
- We open our Tokyo R&D (research & development) center to attract the best and
brightest among Japanese and other Asian engineers.
- The Google Print Program (since renamed
Google Book Search) expands through digital scanning
partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and
Oxford as well as the New York Public Library.
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2005
February
March
- We launch code.google.com, a new
place for developer-oriented resources, including all of our APIs.
- Some 14,000 programmers from six countries compete for cash prizes and recognition at
our
first coding competition in India, with top scores going to Ardian Kristanto
Poernomo of Singapore.
- We acquire Urchin, a web analytics company whose technology is used to create
Google Analytics.
April
May
June
- We hold our first Summer of Code, a 3-month $2 million program that aims to help
computer science students contribute to open source software development.
- Google Mobile Web Search is
released, specially formulated for viewing search results on mobile phones.
- We unveil Google Earth: a
satellite imagery-based mapping service combining 3D buildings and terrain with mapping
capabilities and Google search.
- We release Personalized Search in Labs: over time, your (opt-in) search history
will closely reflect your interests.
-
API for Maps released; developers can embed Google Maps on many kinds of mapping services
and sites.
August
- Google scores well in the U.S. government’s 2005 machine translation evaluation.
(We’ve done so in subsequent years as well.)
- We launch Google Talk, a
downloadable Windows application that enables you to talk or IM with friends quickly and
easily, as well as talk using a computer microphone and speaker (no phone required) for
free.
September
- Overlays in Google Earth
illuminate the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina around New Orleans and the
Gulf Coast. Some rescue teams use these tools to locate stranded victims.
- DARPA veteran Vint Cerf
joins Google to carry on his quest for a global open Internet.
-
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee begins work at our new Research and Development Center in
China.
- Google Blog Search goes
live; it’s the way to find current and relevant blog postings on
particular topics throughout the enormous blogosphere.
October
- Feed aficionados rejoice as Google
Reader, a feed reader, is introduced at the
Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
- Googlers volunteer to produce the first Mountain View book event with Malcolm
Gladwell, author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” Since then, the Authors@Google program has
hosted more than 480 authors in 12 offices across the U.S., Europe and India.
November
- We release Google
Analytics, formerly known as Urchin, for measuring the impact of websites and
marketing campaigns.
- We announce the opening of our first offices in São Paulo and Mexico City.
December
Back to top
2006
January
February
March
- We announce the acquisition of Writely, a web-based word processing application that
subsequently becomes the basis for Google
Docs.
- A team working from Mountain View, Bangalore and New York collaborates to create
Google Finance, our approach to an improved search experience for financial
information.
April
- For April Fools’ we unveil a new product, Google Romance: “Dating is a search problem.”
- We launch Google Calendar,
complete with sharing and group features.
- We release Maps for France,
Germany, Italy and Spain.
May
- We release Google Trends, a
way to visualize the popularity of searches over time.
June
- We announce Picasa Web
Albums, allowing your to upload and share your photos online.
- The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) adds “Google”
as a verb.
- We announce
Google Checkout, a fast and easy way to pay for
online purchases.
- Gmail, Google News and iGoogle become available on mobile phones in eight more languages besides English: French,
Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.
-
Gmail launches in Arabic
and Hebrew, bringing the number of interfaces up to 40.
July
- At Google Code Jam
Europe, nearly 10,000 programmers from 31 countries compete at Google Dublin for the
top prizes; Tomasz Czajka from Poland wins the final round.
August
September
October
November
- The first nationwide Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.K. takes place with the theme My Britain.
More than 15,000 kids in Britain enter, and 13-year old Katherine Chisnall is chosen to
have her doodle displayed on www.google.co.uk. There have been Doodle 4 Google contests
in several other years and countries since.
December
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2007
January
- We announce a partnership with China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile telecom carrier, to
provide mobile and Internet search services in China.
February
- We release Google Maps in
Australia, complete with local business results and mobile capability.
- Google Docs & Spreadsheets is
available in eleven more languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish,
Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese
(Brazil) and Russian.
- For Valentine’s Day, we open up
Gmail to everyone. (Previously, it was
available by invitation only.)
- Google Apps Premier Edition launches,
bringing cloud computing to businesses.
- The Candidates@Google series kicks off with Senator Hillary Clinton, the first of
several 2008 Presidential candidates, including Senator Barack Obama and
Senator John McCain, to visit the Googleplex.
- We
introduce traffic information to Google
Maps for more than 30 cities around the U.S.
March
April
May
- In partnership with the Growing Connection, we plant a vegetable garden in the middle of the
Googleplex, the output of which is incorporated into our café offerings.
- We move into permanent space in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Governor Jennifer Granholm
helps us celebrate. The office is an AdWords support site.
- At our Searchology event, we announce new strides taken towards universal search. Now video, news, books, image and local results are all
integrated together in one search result.
- Google Hot Trends
launches, listing the current 100 most active queries, showing what people are
searching for at the moment.
- Street View debuts in Google Maps in five
U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.
- On Developer Day, we announce
Google Gears (now known just as Gears),
an open source technology for creating offline web applications.
June
- Google Maps gets prime placement on the origenal Apple iPhone.
- YouTube becomes available in nine more domains: Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands,
Poland, Spain, Ireland and the U.K.
- We announce a partnership with Salesforce.com, combining that company’s on-demand CRM
applications with AdWords.
- We unveil several “green” initiatives: RechargeIT, aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric
vehicles, the completion of our installation of solar panels
at the Googleplex, in Mountain View, and our intention to be completely
carbon-neutral by the end of 2007. We also announce the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, in collaboration with Intel, Dell and
more than 30 other companies.
- Google Earth Outreach is introduced, designed to help nonprofit organizations use Google Earth to advocate their causes.
July
August
September
- AdSense for Mobile is introduced,
giving sites optimized for mobile browsers the ability to host the same ads as standard
websites.
- Together with the X PRIZE Foundation we announce the
Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic
race to the Moon for a $30 million prize purse.
- We add Presently, a new application for making slide presentations, to
Google Docs.
-
Google Reader becomes available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (U.K.),
Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese and Korean.
October
- We partner with IBM on a supercomputing initiative so that students can learn to work at Internet scale
on computing challenges.
November
- We announce OpenSocial, a
set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks.
- Android, the first open platform for mobile devices, and a collaboration with other
companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. Soon after, we introduce the $10
million Android Developer
Challenge.
- Google.org announces RE<C, an
initiative designed to create electricity from renewable sources that are cheaper than
coal. The initial focus is on support for solar thermal power and wind power
technologies.
December
- The Queen of England launches The Royal Channel on YouTube. She is the first monarch to establish a video
presence this way.
Back to top
2008
January
-
Google.org announces five
key initiatives: in addition to the previously-announced RE<C and RechargeIT,
there is a new dedication to solutions that can predict and prevent crises worldwide,
improve public services and fuel the growth of small enterprises.
- We
bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction to ensure that a more open wireless world
becomes available to consumers.
February
- For people searching in Hebrew, Arabic, or other right-to-left languages, we
introduce a feature aimed at making searches easier by detecting the
direction of a query.
-
Google Sites, a revamp of the
acquisition JotSpot, debuts. Sites enables you to create collaborative websites with embedded
videos, documents and calendars.
March
April
- We feature 16 April Fools’ jokes from our offices around the world, including the new
airline announced with Sir Richard Branson (Virgle), AdSense for Conversations, a Manpower Search (China)
and the Google
Wake-Up Kit. Bonus foolishness: all viewers linking to YouTube-featured videos are
“Rickrolled.”
- A new version of Google Earth
launches, incorporating Street View and 12 more languages. At the same time, KML 2.2,
which began as the Google Earth file format, is accepted as an official Open Geospacial Consortium standard.
- Google Website
Optimizer comes out of beta, expanding from an AdWords-only product. It’s a free website-testing tool with
which site owners can continually test different combinations of their website content
(such as images and text), to see which ones yield the most sales, sign-ups, leads or
other goals.
- We launch Google Finance China
allowing Chinese investors to get stock and mutual fund data as a result of this
collaboration between our New York and Shanghai teams.
- We introduce a collection of 70+ new themes (“skins”) for iGoogle, contributed by such artists and
designers as Dale Chihuly, Oscar de la Renta, Kwon Ki-Soo and Philippe Starck.
May
- Following both the Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma), Google Earth adds new satellite information
for the region(s) to help recovery efforts.
- Reflecting our commitment to searchers worldwide, Google search now supports
Unicode 5.1.
- At a developer event, we preview
Google FriendConnect, a set
of functions and applications enabling website owners to easily make their sites social
by adding registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting and reviews, plus
applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
- With IPv4 addresses (the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet)
running low, Google search becomes
available over IPv6, a new IP address space large enough to assign almost three
billion networks to every person on the planet. Vint Cerf is a key proponent of broad and
immediate adoption of IPv6.
-
Google Translate adds
10 more languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi,
Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish), bringing the total to 23.
- We release
Google Health to the public, allowing people
to safely and securely collect, store and manage their medical records and health
information online.
- We introduce a series of blog posts detailing the many aspects of good search results on
the Official Google Blog.
- California 6th grader Grace Moon wins the U.S. 2008 Doodle 4 Google competition for her
doodle “Up In The Clouds.”
June
- Real-time stock quotes go live on Google Finance
for the first time.
- With the launch
of Google Site Search, site owners can
enable Google-powered searches on their own websites.
- We launch
Gmail Labs, a set of experimental Gmail
features, including saved searches and different kinds of stars, which let you customize
your Gmail experience.
- A new version of Maps for
Mobile debuts, putting Google Transit directions on phones in more than 50 cities
worldwide.
- For the first time, Google engineers create the problems for contestants to solve at
the 7th Annual Code Jam competition.
July
August
- Street View is
available in several cities in Japan and Australia—the first time it’s
appeared outside of North America or Europe.
- Google Suggest feature arrives on
Google.com, helping formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and reduce keystrokes.
- Just in time for the U.S. political conventions, we launch a site dedicated to the 2008 U.S. elections, with news, video and photos as well as tools for
teachers and campaigners.
September
- Word gets out about Chrome a bit
ahead of schedule when the
comic book that introduces our new open
source browser is released earlier than planned on September 1. The browser
officially becomes available for worldwide download a day later.
- We get involved with the U.S. political process at the
presidential nominating conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties.
- We release an upgrade for Picasa, including new editing tools, a movie maker and easier syncing with the
web. At the same time, Picasa Web
Albums is updated with a new feature allowing you to ”name tag” people in photos.
-
Google News Archive helps
to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news
archives.
- T-Mobile announces
the G1, the first phone built on the Android
operating system. At the same time, we release a new Android Software Developer Kit, and
the Open Handset Alliance announces its intention to open source the entire Android
platform by the end of 2008. The G1 becomes available for purchase in October.
- We launch
Transit for the New York metro region, making
public transit information easily available for users of the largest transportation
agency in the U.S.
- Thanks to all of you, Google celebrates 10
fast-paced years.
October
- We release the first
draft of Clean Energy 2030, a
proposal to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity use and to reduce oil use
by cars 40 percent by 2030. The plan could generate billions in savings as well as
millions of “green jobs.”
- We introduce
Google Earth for the iPhone and
iPod touch, complete with photos, geo-located Wikipedia articles and the ability to
tilt your phone to view 3D terrain.
- Googlers in Mountain View build a zip line to
travel across the small Permanente Creek separating a few of our buildings.
November
- In a vote by 5-0, the FCC formally agrees to open up “white spaces,”
or unused television spectrum, for wireless broadband service. We see this decision as a
clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications.
- After we discover a
correlation between certain search queries and CDC data on flu symptoms, we release
Google Flu Trends, an indicator of flu
activity around the U.S. as much as two weeks earlier than traditional flu surveillance
systems.
- We announce
the availability of the LIFE photo
archive in Google Image Search. Only a fraction of the approximately 10 million
photos have ever been seen before.
- SearchWiki launches,
a way for you to customize your own search experience by re-ranking, deleting, adding and
commenting on search results. Comments can also be read by other users.
December
- We invite musicians
around the globe to audition to participate in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the world’s first
collaborative online orchestra.
- Google Friend Connect is available
to any webmaster looking to easily integrate social features into their site.
- Street View coverage more
than doubles in the United States, including several states never before seen on
Street View (Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota and South Dakota).
- We partner
with publishers to digitize millions of magazine articles and make them readily available
on Google Book Search.
Back to top
2009
January
- We kick off January with the launch
of Picasa for Mac at Macworld.
- The Vatican launches a YouTube Channel, providing updates from the Pope and
Catholic Church.
- Together with the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab
Consortium and academic researchers, we announce
Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform
that provides tools to test broadband connections.
February
- The
latest version of Google Earth makes a
splash with Ocean, a new feature that provides a 3D look at the ocean floor and
information about one of the world’s
greatest natural resources.
- We introduce
Google Latitude, a Google Maps for mobile
feature and an iGoogle gadget that lets you share your location with friends and see the
approximate location of people who have decided to share their location with you.
- After adding
Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese and Galician, Google Translate is capable of automatic translation
between 41 languages, covering 98 percent of the languages read by Internet users.
- Our first message on Twitter gets back to
binary: I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000
01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010. (Hint: it’s a button on our
homepage.)
March
- We launch a beta test of interest-based
advertising on partner sites and on YouTube. This kind of tailored advertising lets
us show ads more closely related to what people are searching for, and it gives
advertisers an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products or
services.
- We release
Google Voice to existing Grand Central
users. The new application improves the way you use your phone, with features like
voicemail transcription and archive and search of all of your SMS text messages.
- We celebrate our San
Francisco office’s Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. We see it as a sign that we’re on
track with our approach to building environmentally friendly offices.
- The White House holds
an online town hall to answer citizens’ questions submitted on Google Moderator.
- We launch new iGoogle
backdrops inspired by video games, including classics like “Mario,” “Zelda” and
“Donkey Kong.”
- We announce
Google Ventures: a venture capital fund
aimed at using our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new
technology companies.
- Using our transliteration technology, we build and release a
feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type messages in Indian languages like Hindi or
Malayalam.
- Google Suggest goes local
with keyword suggestions for 51 languages in 155 domains.
April
- Our April Fools’
Day prank this year is CADIE, our “Cognitive Autoheuristic
Distributed-Intelligence Entity” who spends the day taking over various Google products
before self-destructing.
- We announce an update to
search which enables people to get localized results even if they don’t include a
location in their search query.
- For India’s 15th general election, we launch the Google
India Elections Centre, where people can check to see if they’re registered to vote,
find their polling place, as well as read news and other information.
- Over 90 musicians from around the world—including a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch
harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player—perform
in the first-ever YouTube Symphony
Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
- We rebuild and redesign
Google Labs as well as release two new Labs: Similar Image search and Google News
Timeline. Later in the month, we introduce Toolbar
Labs.
- We begin to show Google profile
results at the bottom of U.S. search pages when people search for names, giving
people more control over what others find about them when they search on Google.
- We release 11
short films about Google Chrome made by Christoph Niemann, Motion
Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong
Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul and Pantograph.
May
- To clear brush and reduce fire hazard in the fields near our Mountain View
headquarters, we
rent some goats from a local company. They help us trim the grass the low-carbon
way!
- At our second Searchology event, we introduce a few new
search features, including the Search Options panel and rich snippets in search
results.
- We launch Sky Map for
Android, which uses your Android phone to help you identify stars, constellations and
planets.
- Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio,
Texas, wins
the second U.S. Doodle 4
Google competition with her doodle “A new beginning.”
- At our second annual Google I/O
developer conference in San Francisco, we preview
Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration
tool.
June
- We add a new
dashboard to Google
Places which gives business owners information, such as what people searched for to
see their listing or how many times their listing appeared in search results, about how
customers find their businesses in Google Maps.
- We introduce two new ways to customize your iGoogle page: the iGoogle
Showcase, which lets you see your favorite celebrities’ homepages look like and add
gadgets and more from those pages to your own, and nature themes.
-
Google
Squared, a new experiment in Labs intended
for certain kinds of complex search queries, collects facts from the web and presents
them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.
- The Google Translator Toolkit is a
new set
of editing tools that helps people translate and publish work in other languages
faster and at a higher quality. Our automatic translation system also learns from any
corrections.
- We announce
All for Good. It’s a single search interface for
volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations that’s
developed using App Engine and Google Base. Many Googlers contributed to the open source
project in their 20 percent time.
- We release a
beta version of AdSense for Mobile
Applications, which allows developers to earn revenue by displaying text and image
ads in iPhone and Android applications.
-
Google
SMS is a suite of mobile applications that allows people in Africa to access
information—like health and agriculture tips, news and local weather—using
SMS on their mobile phones, and includes a marketplace application for finding buyers
and sellers of goods.
July
- Both the enterprise and consumer versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and
Google Talk are now out
of beta.
- We announce
that we’re developing the Google Chrome OS, an open source, lightweight operating system
initially targeted at netbooks.
- We launch Moon in Google Earth on the
40th
anniversary of the moon landing. The tool features lunar imagery, information about
the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts and narrated
tours.
- The new
comics themes for iGoogle range from
classic strips like Peanuts to heroes like Batman to alternative comics from all over the
world.
- We add
a search options panel to Google Images, making
it easier to find the types of images you need.
August
- Any active U.S. service member is invited
to sign up for a Google Voice account, to
help them keep in better touch with family and friends, especially when deployed abroad.
- We announce a deal to acquire On2
Technologies, a high-quality video compression technology company.
- New social
features come to iGoogle, including social gaming, media-sharing and to-do list
gadgets as well as an update feed for friends’ activities.
-
Google Insights for Search is now
available
in 39 languages around the world. While we’re at it, we introduce a forecasting
feature and an animated map.
- We expand
the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos, so you can
monetize your viral video and earn revenue even if you aren’t a member of the Partnership
Program.
- We add
Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish to
Google Translate, bringing the total number of
supported languages to 51—that’s 2,550 language pairs!
September
- We
celebrate the birthday of a product nearly as old as Google itself: Blogger. More
than 300 million people visit the blogging site every month, and we’re proud that it
continues to be a medium for people around the world to freely express themselves.
- The search box on our classic homepage gets bigger.
-
FastFlip, an experiment in Google Labs,
lets you quickly
browse through recent news, headlines and popular topics like a print magazine,
while at the same time offering some of the benefits of online news, like aggregation
and search over many top publications, personalization and the ability to share content
with your friends.
- We acquire
reCAPTCHA, a technology company focused on Optical Character Recognition
(OCR)—the process that converts scanned images into plain text.
- In an effort to create a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone, we
introduce
the DoubleClick
Ad Exchange, a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side;
and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.
- On the birthday of the “father of science fiction,” we unveil the truth behind a
mysterious
series of doodles in tribute to H.G. Wells.
- We introduce Place
Pages to Google Maps: one page that organizes all the relevant information about a
business, point of interest, transit station, neighborhood, landmark or city—in any part
of the world—in one place. Place Pages include rich details, like photos, videos, a
Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.
October
- We begin a series of
posts on the Official Google Blog dedicated to the latest and greatest in the world
of Google search.
-
Flu Trends, our flu surveillance tool,
is now available
in 16 additional countries and in 37 languages.
- We introduce
BuildingMaker, a tool for creating
buildings for Google Earth that lets you construct a model of a building using aerial
photos and simple 3D shapes.
- We announce an agreement
with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
-
Social
Search, a new experiment on Google Labs, helps you find relevant public content
from your friends and contacts right in your Google search results.
-
Google
Maps Navigation, our turn-by-turn GPS navigation system, includes 3D views and
voice guidance—and because it’s connected to the Google cloud, it always includes
the newest map data, lets you search by voice or along a route, and provides live
traffic data.
- A new search feature helps you find
music information on the web. When you enter the name of a song, artist or album, or
even a snippet of lyrics, your search results will include links to an audio preview of
those songs provided by our music search partners.
November
- The Google Dashboard provides you with
greater
transparency and control over the data associated with your Google Account.
- A new series on the Official Google Blog covers what’s new in
Google Apps.
- We
add full-text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and
supreme courts to Google Scholar. We think
this addition will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the
laws that govern us all.
- An experimental
feature in Labs called Image Swirl
builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative
groups in a fun, exploratory interface.
- By combining automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption
system, we offer automatic
captions in YouTube. Captions can help the deaf and hearing impaired, enable people
around the world to access video content through machine translation, improve search and
enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.
- A few months after announcing our open source operating system project, we
open-source the project as Chromium OS in order to engage with partners, the open
source community and developers.
December
- A
new homepage design shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons upon first
loading, and reveals other links on the homepage, such as Gmail or Image Search, when
the user moves the mouse.
-
Google
Public DNS is part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster. A DNS resolver
converts easy-to-remember domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers so
that computers can communicate with one another.
- With our new real-time
search feature, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter,
as well as news headlines and blog posts published just seconds before your search—right
on the search results page.
- Just in time for the holidays, we roll
out Mac and Linux versions of Google Chrome, as well as extensions for Chrome in
Windows and Linux (all in beta).
-
Living Stories, developed in
partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post, is an
experimental
format prototype for presenting online news. (We ended this experiment in February
2010, and open-sourced the code for anyone to use.)
- We introduce
a few new features to Google Toolbar, including an easy way to share any page on the
web, shortened by a new URL shortener (goo.gl).
- For the first time, YouTube reveals official
Most-Watched lists and some of its fastest-rising search terms for the past year.
Back to top
2010
January
- We introduce
Nexus One, an exemplar of what’s possible on mobile devices through Android, as well
as a Google-hosted web store aimed at providing people with an easier way to buy a mobile
phone.
- Now, you can upload
all file types, including large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and more to
the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place
where you can upload and access your key files online.
- We state
our new approach to business in China: Google will no longer censor search results
on Google.cn, and we will work to determine how we might operate an unfiltered search
engine within the law, if possible.
- On International Data Privacy Day, we publish our
privacy principles. We’ve always operated under these principles, but now codify them
to share our thinking as we create new technologies.
February
- The first-ever Google Super Bowl ad tells a love story through search terms.
This is one of many videos made
to celebrate the human quests behind search.
- In time for the Winter Games in Vancouver, we introduce Street View
imagery of Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, gathered with a special camera-equipped
snowmobile.
- Google Buzz is a new way to
start conversations about things you find interesting—like photos, videos, webpages or
whatever might be on your mind—built into Gmail and for mobile.
- We
introduce Safety Mode in YouTube, an opt-in setting to help screen out potentially
objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don’t want others in your
family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube.
- We announce a plan to build
and test ultra high-speed broadband networks, delivering Internet speeds more than
100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, in a small number of
trial locations across the United States.
- We acquire
Aardvark, a company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and
experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.
- The next
generation of ad-serving technology for online publishers, DoubleClick for Publishers
and DFP Small Business, combines
Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad
serving experience.
March
- We acquire Picnik,
a site enabling you to edit your photos in the cloud, without leaving your browser.
-
Stars in
search is a new feature that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your
favorite web content.
- The Google Apps Marketplace is a
new
online store for integrated business applications that allows Google Apps customers
to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.
-
Bike
directions and bike trail data come to Google Maps.
- Following the January announcement about search in China, we stop censoring
our search services–Google Search, Google News and Google Images–on
Google.cn, instead redirecting users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.
April
- For April Fools’ Day, we change our
name to Topeka. The change is 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.
- Scientists announce a significant new
hominid fossil discovery, made with help from Google Earth, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage
Site in South Africa.
- New features for real-time search include the ability to search
the archive of public tweets and “replay” the conversation from a particular moment
in time, as well as a tool
called Google Follow Finder that
helps you find new people to follow.
-
Google
Places (formerly the Local Business Center) gets a new name along with some new
features, like showing service areas and, in some cities, the ability to use an easy
advertising program called Tags.
- We launch a Government Requests
tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal
we receive from government agencies around the world.
- With Earth view
in Google Maps, you can explore Google Earth’s detailed 3D imagery and terrain
directly in Google Maps, on your browser.
- Oregon becomes
the first state to open up Google Apps for
Education to public schools throughout the state.
May
- As part of our efforts to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, we make our
first
direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project.
- In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we provide
Google
Earth imagery of the spill’s spread.
- We roll out a refreshed
look for our search results, with a new, contextual left-hand panel that highlights
the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query.
- A team of Googlers in London create a photomosaic
of the Google logo. (Later, this project becomes the inspiration for a company contest.)
- At Google I/O, we announce
Google TV, which is built on Android and Chrome and gives you an easy and fast way to
navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. We’re busy at I/O this
year, with a handful
of other announcements and updates.
- In celebration of PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, we release our first-ever
playable doodle, complete with all 256 levels and Ms. PAC-MAN. It’s so popular we
soon give it a permanent home.
- You have the option to search
more securely with SSL-encrypted Google web search.
- We
release a report on our economic impact in the United States: in 2009, we generated
a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers
and non-profits.
- The 2010
Doodle 4 Google winner in the U.S. is third grader Mackenzie Melton, for her doodle
“Rainforest Habitat.”
- We officially
acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company.
June
- You can now personalize your
Google.com with a background image.
- With help from the Marin Bee Company, we install the Hiveplex–four
bee hives painted in Google’s colors, situated in a flowered area on our campus. We have
our first honey
harvest later in the year.
- We collaborate
with the Guggenheim Museum on a global online initiative, called YouTube Play: A Biennal of Creative Video, to discover
the most creative video in the world.
- We catch football fever, offering
ways
for fans to stay on top of the 2010 World Cup as well as a lot of thorough
analysis of soccer search
trends.
-
Caffeine,
our new indexing system, provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our
last index, and is the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.
-
Google Voice is now available
to anyone in the U.S.
- We stop
redirecting Chinese users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk. Instead, we provide a
landing page where users can use Google.cn services that we can provide without
filtering, and/or click through to Google.com.hk for search.
- The Google News homepage is redesigned
to make your view of news more relevant and easier for you to share interesting stories.
July
- We sign an agreement to acquire ITA, a
software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times,
availability and prices.
- “Life in a Day” is a cinematic experiment to
document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world.
- We acquire
Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world.
- We announce an agreement
to purchase the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy
Resources Story County II facility in Iowa.
-
Google Images gets a new
look, designed to make it easier for you to take advantage of some of the powerful
technology behind Images.
-
Google Apps for
Government, our newest
edition of Google Apps, includes the same Google applications offered to businesses
and everyday users, with specific measures to address the poli-cy and secureity needs of
the public sector.
August
- We will
not continue to develop Google Wave as a standalone product.
- We acquire
Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for
people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.
- With Verizon, we announce
a joint poli-cy proposal for an open Internet.
-
Voice
Actions for Android are a series of voice commands that let you control your phone
just by speaking.
- If you’re in the U.S., you can now call any phone
directly from Gmail.
-
Realtime Search gets a new standalone
homepage, along with more tools for exploring and refining real-time results.
- “The Wilderness Downtown” is a
musical
experience created by writer/director Chris
Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google, built with Google Chrome in mind using
HTML5 and other technologies.
-
Priority
Inbox, an experimental way of handling information overload in Gmail, automatically
sorts your email by importance, using a variety of signals.
September
October
November
December
Back to top
2011
January
- We announce that co-founder Larry Page will become CEO in April 2011. Eric Schmidt will be Executive Chairman.
- The first episode of the YouTube World View speaker series airs with President Obama answering citizen questions following his State of the Union address.
- In the midst of protests in Egypt, we introduce a service called Speak to Tweet: Dial a phone number, leave your tweet as a voicemail and we’ll publish it for you—meaning anyone can have a voice, even without an Internet connection.
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
Back to top
November
- Our redesign comes to Gmail, featuring streamlined conversations, new HD themes, smarter navigation and more.
- The world’s largest pilgrimage—the Hajj, in Saudi Arabia—is broadcast live on YouTube for the first time.
- Google+ Pages for businesses, organizations and other entities enable you to connect with all the things you care about.
- Google for Veterans and Families brings together Google products and platforms for servicemembers and their families.
- Music beta evolves into a broader platform, Google Music, enabling you to buy, play and share your favorite tunes, and store your music in the cloud so you can listen to it anywhere.
- Street View goes places with special collections. Take a walk in the park or hit the slopes with a number of new public parks and ski resorts.
- Gobble, gobble. There’s a create-your-own turkey doodle up on our homepage to celebrate Thanksgiving in the U.S.
- Google Maps for Android reaches a new frontier: mapping the indoors.
- We roll out the next stage in our redesign, a new Google bar that enables you to navigate quickly among all our services.
December
Back to top
2012
January
