How Google search has changed from 1997 to today

It has been 25 years since the debut of the first version of Google search to quickly retrieve the right information on the web and from 1997 (the year of the domain registration) to today, innovations have added brick after brick to build a very good service. more extensive and deeper than one would ever have imagined a quarter of a century ago. We participated in an online panel discussion with Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Google Search, who retraced the most important stages of the evolutionary journey of Google Search. It all started the year before, in 1996, with the PageRank algorithm developed by the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as part of a research project at Stanford University, to evaluate the goodness of a page compared to a ' other in terms of quality and quantity of links that connect it.

It was 1998 when the first Doodle appeared, dedicated to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert with the two founders who changed the logo to inform of the absence of the team in the office, while in 2020 it is the time of the first international Doodle signed by the then intern Dennis Hwang on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The same year Google is already available in ten languages, including Italian and the index reaches one billion URLs considered. 2001 saw the debut of the AdWords advertising platform and the "Maybe you were looking ..." which corrects the spelling for more precise search results and Google Images, inspired by visual results and unsologited by substantial searches on the audacious green low-cut dress worn by Jennifer Lopez at the Grammy Awards. 2002 inaugurates important innovations such as the Zeitgeist at the end of the year which summarizes the most popular searches of the last 12 months, the spread of Google's api dedicated to developers who want to exploit the search potential within their work and the Google News platform that collects news from various sources.

In 2003 here is the first easter egg with the online calculator that opens result 42 looking for "The answer on life, the universe and everything" quoting the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , while in 2004 automatic completion made its debut, based on the volume of searches and on geolocation, promising to speed up typing times, but undoubtedly also being responsible for conveying users. In 2005 Maps and Weather arrived plus optimized search for smartphones. In 2006, other services that are still widely used today emerge, such as Google Translate and Google Trends, which display search volumes in a deeper way. In 2009 comes the voice search that translates the voice into commands, but also the ads with product details. In 2010 Google introduced the new indexing system called Caffeine which provides 50% of the most updated results and the useful search through images to find results starting from a photo to upload or link.

In 2014 the system updates to Hummingbird (hummingbird) which tries to better understand searches with a language closer to everyday and colloquial language, especially in the case of direct questions and the Snippets arrive, that is the useful boxes with portions of posts, articles or others content from search results. In 2016 the most precise neural machine translation and ad optimization through machine learning arrive, while in 2017 here is Lens to search naturally by "showing" what you have in front of the system via the camera, with text translation in real time. in 2019 and land on desktop in 2021. For the Covid-19 pandemic, Google introduces important information since 2020 with a dedicated portal that tries to convey users to confirmed and reliable sources. Here is the portal dedicated to the evolution of Google search with the timeline to explore.