Google celebrated the 25th anniversary of its launch this week – and it’s hard to envisage what life was like before.
Few companies have become so integral to society that they become a verb, but the search giant remains the shorthand for looking something up online despite AI threatening the habit.
Google has of course seen off plenty of would-be rivals before (any Ask Jeeves aficionados out there?) – it would be foolish to write off one of the world’s best-known brands after all it’s been through.
Here are 25 moments that helped get Google to where it is today.
1. Launch day (1998)
In 1996, Stanford University computer whizzes Larry Page and Sergey Brin dreamt up a search tool that could better organise the internet’s websites.
Two years later their project was noticed by investor Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote them a $100,000 cheque.
They used the cash to start an office in the California garage of their friend, and future YouTube boss, Susan Wojcicki.
After buying the domain name Google.com, they got to work.
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Image: Google in 1998. Pic: Web Design Museum
2. Here comes the money train (2000)
Google’s growth was rapid and it had moved offices several times by 2000, which is when its transformation into a global behemoth would really begin.
Having set up its own campus in Mountain View, California (the area of Silicon Valley where it’s still based), the company launched AdWords.
This allowed advertisers to purchase search terms they wanted to be in the results for – and started a money train that would turn Google into one of the world’s richest firms.
Image: Google co-founders Larry Page (L) and Sergey Brin
3. Beyond words (2001)
Google had a big year in the boardroom and on its website in 2001, with experienced tech boss Eric Schmidt named chief executive and its co-founders becoming company presidents.
For users, this year saw images added to the website’s search results. It was driven by demand for snaps of a dress Jennifer Lopez had worn at the Grammy Awards in 2000.
Image: Jennifer Lopez at the Grammy Awards in 2000
4. From email to Gmail (2004)
Generally you should take anything you see announced online on 1 April with a pinch of salt, but Google’s Gmail announcement was no joke.
The free web email client, which now has more than 1.8 billion users, was joined in 2001 by Google Autocomplete, which helped people fine-tune their search queries and would go on to inspire a generation of memes.
Image: An early version of Gmail
5. Getting around (2005)
Not content with changing how we navigate the web, Google started to change how we navigate the real world with Google Maps and Google Earth.
The former is now de-facto satnav for commuters and delivery drivers alike, while the latter gave anyone with a computer the chance to explore far-flung parts of the world in 3D.
Image: Apple chief Steve Jobs shows off the first iPhone’s Google Maps app
It’s the backbone of just about every non-Apple handset, and batted away competitors like Microsoft and Nokia to become the iPhone maker’s only real rival.
Image: The G1 phone, the first Google-branded handset, running Android
7. And so does YouTube (2006)
Just a year later, Google made another significant purchase: YouTube for $1.65bn.
The internet’s most ubiquitous video platform has been the backbone of the creator economy for years now, and created an entirely new breed of celebrity. And you can watch Sky News there, too – all day, every day.
Image: YouTube first launched in 2005
8. The great firewall of China (2006)
One place you can’t watch YouTube is China, as it has fallen victim to the country’s infamously tough restrictions on what its citizens can see online.
Not that Google didn’t try to make it work, launching a highly censored version of its search engine there in 2006, before shutting down four years later after criticism from US politicians.
Image: Google’s time in China was short-lived
9. I’m a real word! (2006)
The final entry in a trifecta of 2006 milestones is Google’s addition to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.
Listed as a verb, the dictionary entry said: “To use the Google search engine to find information on the internet. To search for information about (a person or thing) using the Google search engine.”
Image: Google has also made its way into non-English dictionaries
10. The streets won’t forget (2007)
Google Maps was bolstered by the launch of Street View in 2007, which saw the company send out cars with huge cameras strapped to the top of them to capture pictures of the world’s roads.
You have probably seen them out and about over the years – and may even have ended up on Street View itself…
Image: A Google Street View car in Sweden in 2011
11. Chrome is where the heart is (2008)
Much as Gmail has become many people’s preferred email client, so too has Chrome become the browser of choice since launching back in 2008.
Its dominance of the market is quite something given it’s not the default option on Windows PCs or Apple Macs, although anyone with the latter’s laptops will tell you no other software drains the battery quite like it.
Image: Google’s development team introduced Chrome in 2008
12. Google’s first smartphone (2010)
Five years after buying Android, Google took its own stab at making a phone that ran it with the Nexus.
It was pitched as the purest Android experience you could get, providing rapid updates whenever the latest version (always named after a dessert) was released.
Image: The Google Nexus One was manufactured by HTC, which Google later bought
13. Chrome’s not alone (2011)
The Chrome name was unshackled from the web browser market in 2011 as Google began work on a computer operating system to rival Windows and macOS.
Chrome OS has since become the backbone of Google’s Chromebook laptops, which are especially popular in universities and schools.
14. The launch of the Play Store (2012)
Google’s answer to Apple’s App Store opened in 2012, replacing Android Market. The timing turned out well, as that year also saw the launch of a certain game called Candy Crush.
The Play Store raked in a whopping $42bn in revenue last year.
15. Remember Google Glass? (2012)
Google might be one of the world’s biggest companies, but its history is littered with failed experiments.
Image: Momentum for Google Glass fizzled out pretty quickly
16. In at the deep end (2014)
It wasn’t as immediately eye-catching as its purchase of YouTube or Android, but Google snapping up British AI research company DeepMind now looks rather prescient.
Its team is key to Google’s overarching AI strategy as it looks to compete with rivals like OpenAI and Microsoft.
17. A new look (2015)
Google got a major makeover in 2015, with a new logo across its search engine and other products.
It was also the year of a major restructuring, as the company folded itself into a new company called Alphabet alongside other divisions, like the smart home platform Nest.
Image: Google’s refreshed logo has stuck since 2015
18. Pixel perfect (2016)
Google started making its own phones with the Pixel, replacing the old Nexus branding and joining its recently launched smart speakers – Google Home – on shop shelves.
The annoying adverts about removing chips from your photos didn’t arrive until six years later but they haven’t put people off the phones, with the next version due in just a few weeks.
Image: Google’s Pixel 7 range will be replaced in October
Seven years on and its fleet of taxis are working the streets of San Francisco 24/7, despite occasional navigational problems that have blocked traffic and even delayed emergency services.
Image: A Waymo robotaxi during a test ride in San Francisco
20. EU inflicts record fine (2017)
Politicians and regulators have taken a tougher stance on big tech in recent years, and Google has been made an example of on more than a few occasions.
The company said Blake Lemoine’s claims about LaMDA (its GPT-style language model for engaging in human-like conversations) were “wholly unfounded”.
24. The death of Stadia (2022)
Google’s attempt to gatecrash gaming with a Netflix-style streaming service called Stadia was announced in 2019.
However, it flopped in the face of competition from established platforms PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.
Its demise was confirmed in 2022 and the service shut down in January, joining a long line of Google products like Glass and would-be Facebook rival Google+ on the scrap heap.
Image: Stadia was killed off after barely three years
The chatbot’s launch was fast-tracked following the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is becoming integral to Google’s business model, integrated into everything from Gmail to Docs.
Whatever happens next for Google, it’s clear Bard – and AI – will be key.
Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
Image: Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.
Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.
Image: Pic: Planet Labs PBC
The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.
When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.
The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.
The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.
Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.
Image: The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle
Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’
In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.
In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.
“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.
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Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.
He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.
“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Image: Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.
“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”
In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.
Image: Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March
Bodies found in ‘mass grave’
The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.
He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.
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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.
According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
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The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.