Google Museum

Timeline

• 1995–1999

  17 records. From a Stanford doctoral project to a company with an office, investors and its first press release.

• 2000–2004

  27 records. From the first keyword ad sold to the stock market debut.

• 2005–2009

  18 records. The years when Google stopped being only search and ads.

• 2010–2014

  20 records. Five years of big bets and retreats.

• 2015–2019

  17 records. Google became a company inside Alphabet, replaced its 1999 logo and began making its own devices, such as Pixel and Google Home.

• 2020–2024

  10 records. The pandemic changed Google's work and routine, to the point of suspending its April Fools' pranks.

• 2025–2026

  9 records. The most recent period in the collection, still unfolding.

Full records

• BackRub

  Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Stanford research project that ranked pages by the web's link structure.

• Google Search in its beta years (1998–1999)

  After leaving Stanford's addresses, the search engine moved to google.com under a beta label.

• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

  Paper by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page that presented Google as an academic prototype and described PageRank.

• PageRank

  A measure of a page's importance computed from the links it receives and from the importance of the pages citing it.

• Burning Man, the first Doodle

  On August 30, 1998, before leaving for the Burning Man festival, Page and Brin placed the event's stick figure behind the second "o" of the logo.

• Ruth Kedar's logo (1999)

  In 1999 Page and Brin asked Ruth Kedar, then an art professor at Stanford, for a more professional logo.

• MentalPlex, Google's first April Fools' prank (2000)

  On April 1, 2000, Google presented MentalPlex, a search that needed no typing: users just had to project a mental picture of what they wanted to find.

• AdWords, the keyword advertising program (2000)

  Launched in October 2000, AdWords let any advertiser buy small text ads shown next to search results for the keywords they chose.

• Orkut, the Google social network that became Brazilian (2004–2014)

  Orkut was Google's first social network, created as an experimental project by the engineer it was named after, Orkut Büyükkökten.

• Gmail, the 1 GB email announced on April 1 (2004)

  Google announced Gmail on April 1, 2004: free search-based webmail with 1 gigabyte of storage per user.

• Google goes public on Nasdaq (2004)

  In 2004 Google went public through a Dutch auction.

• Google arrives in Brazil: Akwan, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo (2005)

  Google's Brazilian operation began in Minas Gerais: in July 2005 the company bought Akwan Information Technologies, a Belo Horizonte firm founded by computer science professors at UFMG, the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

• Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion (2006)

  Founded in February 2005, YouTube served more than 100 million video views a day and received 65,000 new videos daily when Google announced the purchase on October 9, 2006.

• Android is announced with the Open Handset Alliance (2007)

  Android was introduced on November 5, 2007 as a complete, open platform for phones, with an operating system, middleware, user interface and applications.

• Google Chrome, the browser announced with a comic book (2008)

  Google's browser launched in beta for Windows on September 2, 2008, in more than 40 languages.

• Google stops censoring search in China (2010)

  In January 2010 Google announced that it and more than twenty other U.S.

• Google+, Google's big social bet (2011–2019)

  Launched on June 28, 2011 as a limited field trial, Google+ organized contacts into Circles and offered group video calls, Hangouts.

• Google Glass, the computer on your face (2012–2023)

  On April 4, 2012 a Google[x] team showed Project Glass on a Google+ page, with photos and a video of eyewear displaying weather, calendar, directions and video calls in front of the eyes.

• Alphabet is born, and Google becomes one of its companies (2015)

  In August 2015 Larry Page announced the creation of Alphabet, a new company that took control of Google and of projects far from the core business, such as Calico, X and the investment arms.

• AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol at Go 4–1 (2016)

  Two years after Google bought it, DeepMind put its Go program, AlphaGo, against Lee Sedol, one of the world's top players, in a five-game series in Seoul from March 9 to 15, 2016.

• The U.S. government sues Google over its search monopoly (2020–2024)

  On October 20, 2020 the U.S.

• Bard, Google's chatbot that became Gemini (2023–2024)

  On February 6, 2023 Sundar Pichai introduced Bard, an experimental conversational AI service built on the LaMDA model, first for a group of testers.

• A court finds Google monopolized advertising technology (2025–2026)

  It was Google's second antitrust loss to the Justice Department.

• The judge sets remedies in the search case, and Google keeps Chrome (2025)

  A year after finding Google a search monopolist, Judge Amit Mehta decided the remedies on September 2, 2025.

• Gemini 3, the model that reached Search on day one (2025)

  Announced on November 18, 2025 by Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu, Gemini 3 debuted as Gemini 3 Pro, in preview.

Collections

• Discontinued

  26 records

• Labs

  2 records

• April Fools

  6 records

• Acquisitions

  14 records

• Visual identity

  5 records

• AI models

  7 records

• Google in Brazil

  13 records

• All collections

Categories

• Search and discovery · 16
• Advertising and business · 11
• Communication and community · 8
• Productivity and education · 6
• Browsers and platforms · 7
• Maps and location · 5
• Media and entertainment · 9
• Hardware · 10
• Cloud and developers · 3
• AI and research · 15
• Labs and experiments · 1
• April Fools · 6
• Company and acquisitions · 16
• Identity and culture · 5