Category · 16 records
Search and discovery
Search is the starting point of Google's whole history. This category gathers the academic project behind the search engine, the link-based ranking technology and the product's phases, from the 1998 beta to AI features. Each record separates what was announced from what actually reached people.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryPage and Brin meet at Stanford
1995 — In 1995 Sergey Brin, a Stanford PhD student, was one of the students assigned to show the campus to Larry Page, a prospective student from the University of Michigan.
- Google Museum
Research project › Search and discoveryBackRub
1996 — Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Stanford research project that ranked pages by the web's link structure.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoverygoogle.com domain registered
September 15, 1997 — The google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997, while the search engine still ran at Stanford addresses.
- Google Museum
Product or service › Search and discoveryGoogle Search in its beta years (1998–1999)
1998 — After leaving Stanford's addresses, the search engine moved to google.com under a beta label.
- Google Museum
Technology › Search and discoveryPageRank
April 1998 — A measure of a page's importance computed from the links it receives and from the importance of the pages citing it.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryGoogle on PC Magazine's Top 100 list
December 1998 — In December 1998, a few months after incorporation, PC Magazine included Google in its list of the year's 100 best web sites and search engines.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryGoogle gets a Portuguese version (2000)
May 9, 2000 — In May 2000 Google launched versions in French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryThe index passes 1 billion addresses (2000)
June 26, 2000 — On the same day the Yahoo! deal was announced, Google said its index had passed 1 billion URLs.
- Google Museum
Product or service › Search and discoveryGoogle Image Search (2001)
July 2001 — In July 2001 Google began searching images, with about 250 million of them indexed.
- Google Museum
Product or service › Search and discoveryGoogle Answers, questions answered by paid researchers (2002–2006)
2002 — Users asked a question and set how much they would pay for a good answer, between $2 and $200.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryGoogle stops censoring search in China (2010)
January 12, 2010 — In January 2010 Google announced that it and more than twenty other U.S.
- Google Museum
Technology › Search and discoveryKnowledge Graph, things not strings (2012)
May 16, 2012 — Introduced by Amit Singhal under the motto "things, not strings", the Knowledge Graph models real-world people, places and things and the links between them.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryThe U.S. government sues Google over its search monopoly (2020–2024)
October 20, 2020 — On October 20, 2020 the U.S.
- Google Museum
Product or service › Search and discoveryAI Overviews, AI-generated answers in Search (2024)
May 14, 2024 — After being tested in Search Labs, AI Overviews, AI-generated summaries at the top of the results page, began reaching all U.S.
- Google Museum
Product or service › Search and discoveryAI Mode, search as a conversation (2025)
May 20, 2025 — First tested in Search Labs, AI Mode was opened to all users in the United States starting at Google I/O on May 20, 2025.
- Google Museum
Event › Search and discoveryThe judge sets remedies in the search case, and Google keeps Chrome (2025)
September 2, 2025 — A year after finding Google a search monopolist, Judge Amit Mehta decided the remedies on September 2, 2025.