Timeline of Google Search
Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2023, with over eight billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.
For a history of Google the company, including all of Google's products, acquisitions, and corporate changes, see the history of Google page.
Big picture
| Time period | Development |
|---|---|
| 1996–1997 | Development of basic technology, launch of search engine, attachments like gmail and classroom come later. |
| 2000 | Internationalization: search is launched in 13 new languages. |
| 2001–2004 | Google launches many new search categories, such as Google News, Google Books, and Google Scholar. |
| 2002 onward | The beginning of explicitly announced search algorithm updates. |
| 2008–2010 | Faster search experience for user: Google Suggest (experimental launch 2004, integrated into main search engine 2008), Google Instant (2010), and Google Instant Previews. |
| 2005, 2009, 2012 | Google starts using web histories to help in searches (2005), experimentally launches social search (2009), and launches Search Plus Your World (2012). |
| 2009–2010 | Caffeine update for faster indexing of the web and fresher and on-topic search results. |
| 2011–2014 | Google Panda (an update to some parts of Google's search algorithm) is released in 2011, with announced updates continuing till September 2014 (Panda 4.1). Stated goals include cracking down on spam, content farms, scrapers, and websites with a high ad-to-content ratio. |
| 2012–2014 | Google Penguin (an update to some parts of Google's search algorithm) is released in 2012, with the goal of concentrating on webspam. The last named update is in October 2014. Starting December 2014, Penguin moves to continuous updates (Penguin Everflux). |
| 2012 onward | Google integrates Google Knowledge Graph into its search results. |
| 2013 | Google releases Google Hummingbird, an update that may enable semantic search in the future and integrate better with the Knowledge Graph. |
| 2014 onward | Google makes a major update to its algorithm for local search. The update gets the name Google Pigeon. |
| 2015 onward | Google alerts webmasters to mobile usability issues in January, and announces a major update to its search algorithm, to be rolled out starting April 21, 2015, that will heavily demote mobile-unfriendly sites for web searches on mobile devices. |
| 2019 April | In early April 2019, a large de-indexing bug was reported to be dropping pages out of the index. Google wrote on April 11, 2019, "The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation." |