Eight Years of Change on the Google Homepage

As the currently largest global provider of network search engines, Google's growth rate far exceeds that of Microsoft in its early days. Since its establishment in 1998, Google has turned eight years old. In these eight years, how did Google grow? Actually, one can glimpse some clues from Google’s homepage.

In 1998: The Beta version of Google still emphasized the "Stanford search" method, but it had already started offering the Google Friends subscription service to timely report on the latest updates of Google Beta - back then, Google's homepage was rather "rustic."

In 1999: The prototype of Google's own search engine development emerged, and the homepage already exhibited a simple and brisk style - this is also the version with the least text in Google's history.

In 2000: Having survived the Y2K bug, Google was already selected by Yahoo Internet Life as the best search engine - yes, at that time, they were still recruiting on their homepage.

In 2001: After 9/11, Google expressed condolences to the victims - five years have passed, yet when we look back, it feels like yesterday.

2001 also marked the starting point for Google to gain recognition and recommendation from more people.

In 2002: Google began redesigning the additional link layout on the homepage and added the tab bar to the homepage search bar for the first time.

In 2003: Google's Valentine's Day homepage, the number of indexed pages exceeded 1 billion, and the homepage layout remained largely unchanged.

In 2004: Google introduced an Olympic logo, removed the search box labels, making the homepage even simpler. Of course, "More" was used to represent Google's growing number of additional services.

In 2005: The number of indexed pages almost doubled compared to 2004, and Google Local was launched.

In 2006: More cooperation with the Chinese government, Gmail accounts provided users access to more Google services, more personalized settings options in the top right corner of the homepage, and the number of search index pages reached 25 billion. (from: MyDrivers)