The world’s most popular search engine, Google, turned 25 on Today and celebrates its birthday with a doodle. The company has over the years showcased different doodles on its birthday as part of a “walk down memory lane.” The latest one includes a GIF that turns “Google” into “G25gle” to honor the 25th year. Confetti appears on the page after you click the logo.
“Today’s Doodle celebrates Google’s 25th year. And while here at Google we’re oriented towards the future, birthdays can also be a time to reflect. Let’s take a walk down memory lane to learn how we were born 25 years ago,” the company wrote in its blog.
It added, “Much has changed since 1998 — including our logo as seen in today’s Doodle — but the mission has remained the same: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful…Thank you for evolving with us over the past 25 years. We can’t wait to see where the future takes us, together.”
Highlights Over The Last 25 Years
In the last 25 years, Google has transformed as a company, launching a tonne of new projects and expanding its search capabilities. For instance, in 2001, the business introduced Google Images, which also included the ability to find images. In 2001, Google also introduced the “Did You Mean” function, which prompted users to check their spelling.
Google made it simple for users to swiftly translate between languages later in 2006 when it launched the Google Translate service. Over 100 languages are now supported by Google Translate, up from the initial restriction of Arabic to English translation.
Then, in 2008, Google launched its mobile app for the iPhone and included features like “my location” and “autocomplete.” Google Voice, enabling users to conduct voice searches, was another major launch in 2008. According to a Google statement, “Search by voice is particularly popular in India, where the percentage of Indians doing daily voice queries is nearly twice the global average.”
In order to demonstrate its machine learning expertise and its ability to recognize objects and subsequently convert them into search queries, Google introduced Google Lens in 2017. And now, “Lens sees more than 12 billion visual searches per month,” Google said.
Google also introduced tools that improve user experience, such as Hum to Search, which lets users hum a tune that has become an earworm. Google made use of its machine learning expertise to make this feature available in 2020.
With Google Bard and its LLMs like PaLM 2 and the upcoming Gemini, Google finally shifted its focus to generative AI-powered experiences in 2023.
