Today, if we wanted to know what a tardigrade looked like, we would simply google it, click on “images” without giving it much thought. And so that was what I have been doing. Only today, did I find out about the history and inspiration behind Google Images. It turned out, J-Lo gave us much more than cleavage in her Grammy’s Versace green dress; She gave us Google Images.
Back in the day, Google SERPs were a much simpler thing. All the results page delivered, was a simple page with links on them. After the 2000 Grammy’s, everyone who didn’t see it wanted to see how J-Lo’s crazy green dress looked. Everyone who saw it, well, they wanted to see it again.
For a while, J-Lo’s green dress was the most googled query ever. And Google couldn’t deliver it without having to click at least one more time to get to an article with an image. This didn’t jive well with Google, whose ethos was all about simplicity and giving users the best answer to their query.
When you know they’re looking for a picture, there’s nothing better than serving a picture.
Thus, Google Images was born, in 2001.
I’ve never known of this piece of trivia till today, so I thought it was interesting to share. Plus we know it’s legit because it’s referenced in the Wikipedia page for Google Images.
And in case you did land up on this page searching for, and fully expecting to see J-Lo in that amazing dress, here it is, the updated 2019 version.