Google Search Results: 26 Years of Amazing Change! 🚀
Google Search has been around for over 25 years! 🌐 Public opinion about it has changed a lot in that time. What started as a simple and fast search engine has transformed into a real AI-fueled mess. 😅 How did we get here?
1998: Google launches!
The google.com domain was registered in 1997, but the company considers September 1998 the official launch of Google as we know it today. While it's easy to find images of what the homepage looked like back then, it seems nearly impossible to see the actual search results page.
The best glimpse we can get is by doing a Google search for "Google in 1998." This shows a results page that attempts to mimic the original Google, even with a Yahoo-style exclamation mark in the logo! One of the key features of Google has been around for a long time from the beginning: At the top of the page, the number of results and how long it took to perform the search were listed.
2000: Google Adds Ads!
Museum of Versions
What is sure Ads are Google's cash cow, and they've been almost from the beginning. Ads first appeared on the search results page in October 2000. Google was constantly tweaking their appearance, but they were generally links in prominent boxes above the results. Over time, ads also appeared in the sidebar.
2002: Search Categories Appear!
In the four years since 1998, Google has added a lot to its search engine. Now, there are five tabs above the search results: Web, Images, Groups, Directory, and News. Google Image Search launched with over 250 million images in its database. The results were still very clean and simple.
Visually, Google search results didn't change much in 2005, but there was a important update. First, Google launched a personalized search that used search history to provide more relevant results for users. As we all know, this would become a fundamental part of Google's operations, but at the time it was only accessible on a special domain: google.com/psearch.
2007: Chaos Begins!
Between 2002 and 2007, Google focused on tweaking the search algorithm and adding a few more categories. But in 2007, the clean and simple search results finally saw a big change. For the first time, performing a search on Google would show more than just links in the default web results.
Before this change, if you wanted to search for images, news, or videos, you had to specifically switch to those categories. 2007 introduced the concept of "universal search," which would include images, news, videos, and other categories in the results. A convenient change that signaled the mess to come. 😬
Since they first appeared, search categories have been presented as tabs in a horizontal bar at the top of search results. In 2010, Google made a change and added a vertical sidebar on the right side of the results with categories, icons, and other quick options (categories remained at the top of the screen for convenience).
2011: A Clean Redesign
Museum of Versions
Functionally, not much has changed a year later, but visually, Google has been revamped. 🆕 The colored side icons have been replaced with gray, the category bar at the top has been given a black background, and the Google logo and search bar have been given a light gray background. These types of design changes have been implemented in several other products from Google to achieve a more cohesive image.
The year 2012 marked one of the most significant additions to Google Search in its history: the Knowledge Graph! This displayed additional information in the sidebar, or knowledge carousel, at the top of the page. If you searched for an actor, for example, you'd see a brief biography, media appearances, other actors, and more.
Suddenly, Google search results included a ton of things users weren't necessarily looking for. Universal Search in 2007 started this trend, but the Knowledge Graph expanded it to monumental levels! 🌟 Google wanted people to stay on Google. This was a sign of things to come.
2015: New Google Logo
Google's search results would remain largely the same for a few years, but in 2015, a month after creating a parent company called Alphabet, Google launched the logo we know today. 🌈
2019: Less Gray, More Colors
More minor design changes: Google has removed almost all of the gray in favor of white, and the category icons below the search bar appear in Google's signature colors when enabled. 🎨
2023: Search Suggestions
In 2023, Google began tinkering with the category bar, which had remained fairly static. What was once a static list of categories transformed into a dynamic list of what Google thought you might want. For example, when searching «Apple», you'd see suggestions for "iPhones," "Benefits," "Stores," and "Accessories," interspersed with "News" and "Images. Sometimes, you'd have to open the overflow menu to find the category you actually wanted.
2024: Gemini Invents Things!
The most recent, and perhaps most significant, change occurred in 2024 when Gemini AI summaries were added to search results. So, if you search for a question like "Does water freeze at 27°F?", Gemini tries to provide you with an answer without you having to leave Google.
The problem? Like all language modelsGemini sometimes gets things terribly wrong. The aforementioned question prompted a response from Gemini stating, "No, water won't freeze at 27 degrees Fahrenheit because the freezing point of water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit." That's relatively innocent compared to other times when she recommended using glue to keep cheese stuck to pizza. 🍕
Google says, "The vast majority of AI summaries provide high-quality information." However, it's hard to overstate the dangers of a once-trusted search engine now authoritatively generating misinformation.
Google is undoubtedly one of the companies technology most beloved. 💙 People used Google so much that it became the generic term for performing a web search. However, at some point, Google realized that sending people away from google.com wasn't helping its bottom line. Many people still They love Google, but the addition of AI and a growing number of obstacles in the way of what you want are slowly eroding what attracted people in the first place.
