Here’s a fun little fact: Google Images was created because of Jennifer Lopez, aka J. Lo. This bit of Internet history trivia was recently brought to our attention by Twitter user mattxiv.
This can’t be true, can it? Well we dug around a little and discovered that yes, this is basically the case.
In 2000, Jennifer Lopez wore a Versace silk green dress to the 42nd Grammy Awards. The low-necklined dress drew a baffling amount of coverage around the world.
“It didn’t seem that out there to me. It was a good-looking dress,” she eventually said of the hoo-ha. “I had no idea it was going to be such a big deal.”
The dress didn’t just impact regular media, but had a lasting effect on Google’s search engine. The dress was being searched for in large volumes.
“People wanted more than just text,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained in Project Syndicate in 2015.
“This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”
Cathy Edwards, director of engineering and product for Google Images, later told GQ that this was “completely true”. However, she added the caveat that the small team at the time had already wanted to create an image search, but didn’t know how much resource to prioritize to the project.
After the Jennifer Lopez dress debacle, “it became so clear that this was important”, and the company set out to create it.
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