ooVoo
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ooVoo
Developer(s) ooVoo LLC.
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Type Instant messaging client
License Proprietary
Website http://www.oovoo.com
ooVoo is a proprietary instant messaging client developed by ooVoo LLC. for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.[1] It was released in 2007, and is similar to Skype and Apple's iChat. Calls can be recorded in real-time and six-way video chatting is supported.[2] ooVoo provides real-time comments and warnings about performance and usage, and has a connection speed display that gives an indication of latency.
Contents [hide]
1 Features
2 History
3 ooVoo for business
4 Accolades
5 References
6 External links
[edit]Features
ooVoo allows registered users to communicate through free instant messaging, voice and video chat. ooVoo conferencing software enables high quality video and audio calls with up to twelve locations at the same time – six on video and six on phone; high resolution video and desktop sharing; and PC or Mac to phone calls to landlines and mobile phones for a fee.
Video calls (free) – Video chat with two people at a time, then you, makes three.
Video conferencing (charge) – Allows users to start a group video chat up to 6 people in a call, plus the ability to add in 6 phone participants.
Web video chat (free) – Browser-based video call allows the creator of the web chat to invite non-ooVoo users into the call via email, instant messaging, or social network.
Video messaging (free) – Video messages up to 1 minute long (5 minutes for a fee) can be recorded and sent to another user, to email or shared on YouTube.
Instant messaging (free) – Multi-party text chat with its own instant messenger client. IM chat is supported at any time, as well as during a live video call.
Phone calls (charge) – Low-fee ooVoo to phone calls – to landlines and mobile phones to over 50 countries worldwide.
Desktop sharing (charge) – Allows users to share their screen live during a video call.
File sharing (free) – Send large files (up to 25MB) to any ooVoo contact quickly and securely.
Video call recording (free) – Record and store video calls to share or reuse at a later date.
[edit]History
ooVoo was founded in 2006 by the entrepreneur Clayton L. Mathile, and currently has more than 14 million users worldwide, adding 700,000 new users per month. In June 2007, a PC version was launched to allow high quality video chat from anywhere. In February 2008, video call recording and phone calling were introduced. In May 2008, ooVoo for Mac was launched, creating cross-platform capabilities for video chat. In February 2009, ooVoo 2.0 launched, which included browser-based video chat rooms and video chat through a web link with no download required. The new open API lets developers build customized applications and widgets. In May 2009, the first air-to-ground three-way video conversation was introduced. ooVoo 2.2 was launched in July 2009, and introduced business plans geared for multiple seats and desktop sharing. New pay-as-you-go options and international phone calling was also introduced.
[edit]ooVoo for business
ooVoo video conferencing can be used for online meetings, web conferencing, web presentations, online training and remote support. With multipoint video conference, teleconference, and a suite of additional features, ooVoo allows businesses to connect with colleagues and contacts and reduce spend and time on travel.
In addition to multi-party video and audio conferencing, ooVoo for Business provides a suite of applications specifically designed for business processes such as sales, support, training, and marketing via instant messaging, desktop sharing, recording and storing video, and sending large files.
[edit]Accolades
ooVoo won PC Magazine's Software Innovation "Best in Show" Award at the DigitalLife Expo in September 2007. In March 2008, it won the "Webware 100" award for Communication.
[edit]References
^ Muchmore, Michael (July 30, 2008). "OoVoo Goes High-Res, Adds Web Client". pcmag.com. Retrieved 2010-06-26.
^ Reuters, Thomson (July 17, 2009). "ooVoo takes on Skype, Cisco in video conferencing". Forbes.com. Retrieved 2010-06-26.
[edit]External links
Official website
URL=oovoo
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Internet - Skype
Skype
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Skype
Skype 5.2 running on Windows 7
Developer(s) Skype Limited
Initial release August 2003
Stable release 5.2.60.113 (Windows)
5.1.0.914 (Mac OS X)
2.1.0.81 (Linux) (March 15, 2011; 22 days ago (Windows)
March 24, 2011; 13 days ago (Mac OS X)
January 20, 2010; 14 months ago (Linux)) [+/−]
Preview release [+/−]
Written in Embarcadero Delphi / Objective-C (Mac OS X/iPhone) / C++ with Qt4 (Linux)
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in Multilingual
Type Voice over Internet Protocol / instant messaging / videoconferencing
License Freeware (with some paid features)
Website Skype.com
Part of a series on
Skype
Skype Limited
Features of Skype
Skype protocol
Skype security
v · d · e
Skype (pronounced /ˈskaɪp/, a word-play on type) is a software application that allows users to make voice calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system. Skype has also become popular for its additional features which include instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing. Skype has 663 million registered users as of 2010.[1] The network is operated by Skype Limited, which has its headquarters in Luxembourg and is minority owned by eBay. Most of the development team of Skype is situated in Tallinn, Estonia.[2]
Unlike other VoIP services, Skype is a peer-to-peer system rather than a client–server system, and makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software; the original name proposed – Sky peer-to-peer – reflects this.
Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate,[3] government, home, and education networks,[4] citing reasons such as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage,[5] and security concerns.[6]
Contents [hide]
1 Features
2 History
3 Usage and traffic
4 Client applications and devices
5 System and software
5.1 Protocol
5.2 Protocol detection and control
5.3 User directory
5.4 Audio codecs
5.5 Video codecs
5.6 Client
6 Security and privacy
6.1 Service in the People's Republic of China
7 Customer service
8 Outages and downtime
9 See also
10 References
11 External links
[edit]Features
Main article: Features of Skype
Registered users of Skype are identified by a unique Skype Name, and may be listed in the Skype directory.[7] Skype allows these registered users to communicate through both instant messaging and voice chat. Voice chat allows calls between pairs of users and conference calling, and uses a proprietary audio codec. Skype's text chat client allows group chats, emoticons, storing chat history, offline messaging (since version 5) and editing of previous messages. The usual features familiar to instant messaging users—user profiles, online status indicators, and so on—are also included.
The Online Number (aka SkypeIn) service allows Skype users to receive calls on their computers dialed by regular phone subscribers to a local Skype phone number; local numbers are available for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[8][9] A Skype user can have local numbers in any of these countries, with calls to the number charged at the same rate as calls to fixed lines in the country.
Video conferencing between two users was introduced in January 2006 for the Windows and Mac OS X platform clients. Skype 2.0 for Linux, released on 13 March 2008, also features support for video conferencing.[10] Version 5 beta 1 for Windows, released 13 May 2010, offers free video conferencing with up to 5 people.[11]
Skype for Windows, starting with version 3.6.0.216, supports "High Quality Video" with quality and features, e.g., full-screen and screen-in-screen modes, similar to those of mid-range videoconferencing systems.[12] Skype audio conferences currently support up to 25 people at a time, including the host.
Skype does not provide the ability to call emergency numbers such as 911 in the United States and Canada, 111 in New Zealand, 000 in Australia, or 112 in Europe.[13] The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ruled that, for the purposes of section 255 of the Telecommunications Act, Skype is not an "interconnected VoIP provider".[14] As a result, the U.S. National Emergency Number Association recommends that all VoIP users have an analog line available as a backup.[15]
[edit]History
Skype was founded in 2003 by the Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Dane Janus Friis.[16] The Skype software was developed by Estonian developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn, the same individuals who together with Niklas and Janus were also originally behind the peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa.[17] In April 2003, Skype.com and Skype.net domain names were registered. In August 2003, the first public beta version was released.
One of the initial names for the project was "Sky peer-to-peer", which was then abbreviated to "Skyper". However, some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken.[18] Dropping the final "r" left the current title "Skype", for which domain names were available.[19]
In September 2005, SkypeOut was banned in South China.[20] In October of the same year, eBay purchased Skype[21] and in fall of 2009 sold a majority stake to an investor group.[22] In December 2005, videotelephony was introduced.[23]
In April 2006, the number of registered users reached 100 million. In October, Skype 2.0 for Mac was released, the first full release of Skype with video for Macintosh, and in December, Skype announced a new pricing structure, with connection fees for all SkypeOut calls.[24] Skype 3.0 for Windows was released.[25]
In 2006, a now-discontinued feature called "Skypecasting" was introduced. It allowed recordings of Skype voice over IP voice calls and teleconferences to be used as podcasts. Skypecasts remained in beta until its end. Skypecasts hosted public conference calls, up to 100 people at a time. Unlike ordinary Skype p2p conference calls, Skypecasts supported moderation features suitable for panel discussions, lectures, and town hall forums. Skype operated a directory of public Skypecasts. Skypecasts was discontinued as of 1 September 2008.[26]
Throughout 2007 updates (3.1, 3.2 and 3.5) added new features including Skype Find, Skype Prime, Send Money (which allowed users to send money via PayPal from one Skype user to another), video in mood, inclusion of video content in chat, call transfer to another person or a group, and auto-redial. Skype 2.7.0.49 (beta) for Mac OS X released adding availability of contacts in the Mac Address Book to the Skype contact list, auto redial, contact groups, public chat creation, and an in-window volume slider in the call window. During several days in August, Skype users were unable to connect to full Skype network in many countries[27] because of a Skype system-wide crash which was the result of exceptional number of logins after a Windows patch reboot ("Patch Tuesday").[28] And in November, there was controversy when it was announced that users having London (020) 7 numbers would lose them.[29]
In 2008, Skype released various updates including versions for the Sony PSP hand-held gaming system, version 2.0 for Linux with support for video-conferencing, and version 4 for Windows (with both a full screen[30] and a compact[31] mode). This version dropped support for the "Skype Me" presence indicator, which meant that a user was interested in receiving Skype calls from a non-contact. Skype also discontinued its SkypeCast service without explanation and added internal monthly and daily usage caps on their SkypeOut subscriptions, which had been advertised as "Unlimited". Many users and observers had commented on the high rate of dropped calls and the difficulty reconnecting dropped calls. Skype was used in the seventh season of the U.S. syndicated version of the British game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire in a new Ask the Expert video chat lifeline. In October, analysis revealed TOM-skype—the Chinese version of Skype run by TOM Online—sends content of text messages and encryption keys to monitoring servers.[32]
In 2009, Skype 4 was released,[33] the Linux client was updated, and Skype for SIP, a service aimed at business users, was launched. At that time around 35% of Skype's users were business users.[34] In April 2009, eBay announced plans to spin off Skype through an initial public offering in 2010.[35] In August, Joltid filed a motion with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to terminate a licensing agreement with eBay which allows eBay (and therefore Skype) to use the peer-to-peer communications technology on which Skype is based. If successful, this may have caused a shutdown of Skype in its current form.[36] In September, eBay announced the sale of 65% of Skype to a consortium of Index Ventures and Silver Lake Partners. Early in September, Skype had shut down the Extras developer program.[37] In November, eBay completed the sale of 70% of Skype to a consortium comprising Silver Lake Partners, CPPIB, Andreessen Horowitz, and the original founders valuing the business at USD2.75 billion.[22]
In 2010, a report by TeleGeography Research stated that Skype-to-Skype calls accounted for 13% of all international call minutes in 2009; out of the 406 billion international call minutes a total of 54 billion were used by Skype calls.[38] In May, Skype 5.0 beta was released, with support of group video calls with up to four participants. Also in May, Skype released an updated client for the Apple iPhone which allowed Skype calls to be made over a 3G network. Originally, a 3G call subscription plan was to be instituted in 2011, but the plan was eventually dropped by Skype.[39]
On 9 August 2010, Skype filed with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering.[40][41] In October 2010, Skype announced it had named Tony Bates as their CEO; Bates has been a senior VP at Cisco and responsible for its multi-billion-dollar enterprise, commercial and small business division.[42]
On 14 October 2010, Skype 5.0 for Windows was released with a number of improvements and feature additions, including a Facebook tab to allow users to SMS, chat with, or call their Facebook friends via Skype from the News Feed.[43] This version dropped support for the "Search for Skype Users" option.[44]
On 14 January 2011, Skype announced the acquisition of Qik which is a mobile video sharing platform.[45]
[edit]Usage and traffic
This article is outdated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. Please see the talk page for more information. (July 2010)
Date Total user accounts
(in millions)[46][47][48][49][50][51] Active users — daily presence
(in millions)[52] Skype to Skype minutes
(in billions) SkypeOut minutes
(in billions) Revenue USD
(in millions)
Q4 2005 74.7 10.8 N/A N/A N/A
Q1 2006 94.6 15.2 6.9 0.7 35
Q2 2006 113.1 16.6 7.1 0.8 44
Q3 2006 135.9 18.7 6.6 1.1 50
Q4 2006 171.2 21.2 7.6 1.5 66
Q1 2007 195.5 23.2 7.7 1.3 79
Q2 2007 219.6 23.9 7.1 1.3 90
Q3 2007 245.7 24.2 6.1 1.4 98
Q4 2007 276.3 27.0 11.9 1.6 115
Q1 2008 309.3 31.3 14.2 1.7 126
Q2 2008 338.2 32.0 14.8 1.9 136
Q3 2008 370 33.7 16.0 2.2 143
Q4 2008 405 36.5 20.5 2.6 145
Q1 2009 443 42.2 23.6 2.9 153
Q2 2009 483 – 25.5 3.0 170
Q3 2009 521 – 27.7 3.1 185
Q4 2010 663 - - - -
Users may have more than one account; it is not possible to count actual users, only accounts.
The volume of international traffic routed via Skype is significant. It has become the largest international voice carrier.[53]
Year International call market share
2005 2.9%[54]
2006 4.4%[54]
2008 8%[53]
2010 13%[38]
In January 2011, after the release of video calling on the Skype client for iPhone, Skype reached a record 27 million simultaneous online users.[55] This record was broken with 29 million simultaneous online users on February 21, 2011,[56] and again on March 28, 2011 with 30 million online users.[57]
[edit]Client applications and devices
Skype runs on a number of platforms, and on 29 October 2007, Skype launched its own mobile phone under the brand name 3 Skypephone, which runs a BREW OS.[58] Other platforms officially supported include:
Around 50 mobile phones, as of 2008[59]
The Nokia N800, N810 and N900 Internet Tablets, which use the Maemo environment
Both the Sony mylo COM-1 and COM-2 models
The PlayStation Portable Slim and Lite series, though the user needs to purchase a specially-designed microphone peripheral. The PSP-3000 has a built in microphone which allows communication without the Skype peripheral.[60] PSP Go has the ability to use Bluetooth connections with the Skype application, in addition to its built-in microphone.[61]
Mobile devices running Windows Mobile;[62] in February 2010, Skype announced its decision to discontinue development Skype for Windows Mobile.[63] In May 2010, Skype announced it would not develop a version of Skype for Windows Phone 7.[64]
Symbian; Skype version 5.0 is the latest version for the Symbian platform[65]
The X-Series together with mobile operator 3. However this uses a regular mobile phone call and iSkoot[66] to a Skype gateway, rather than mobile Internet. Other companies produce dedicated Skype phones which connect via WiFi
iOS, using an official application released on 31 March 2009. As of version 2.x, the iPhone application is capable of placing voice calls over 3G and EDGE networks. Skype originally announced it will charge a monthly fee for this feature at the start of 2011, but that was eventually dropped.[39] On December 29, Skype updated their iOS app to version 3.0, allowing mobile video calling.
A variety of BlackBerry and Android 3G Smartphones, through Verizon Wireless' Skype mobile service. Customers can receive Skype calls, instant messages and see friends' presence any time the phone is on. Skype usage isn't charged against customers’ monthly Verizon Wireless minute allowance when calling another Skype account (Skype-to-Skype). Customers in the U.S. use minutes from their calling plan when calling U.S. land lines or cell phones.[67]
Some devices are made to work with Skype by talking to a desktop Skype client or by embedding Skype software into the device. These are usually either tethered to a PC, or have a built-in Wi-Fi client to allow calling from Wi-Fi hotspots like the Netgear SPH101 Skype Wi-Fi Phone, the SMC WSKP100 Skype Wi-Fi Phone, the Belkin F1PP000GN-SK Wi-Fi Skype Phone, the Panasonic KX-WP1050 Wi-Fi Phone for Skype Executive Travel Set, the IPEVO So-20 Wi-Fi Phone for Skype and the Linksys CIT200 Wi-Fi Phone. There are also embedded cordless Skype phones based on DECT, which do not need a PC either, like the DUALphone 3088 from RTX. Netgear and SMC's Wi-Fi phones are considered the two major competitors in the market, with reviews of the Wi-Fi phones giving them equal coverage.[citation needed]
The Skype Wi-Fi Phone is a wireless mobile phone that allows users to make Skype calls, using a wireless Internet connection. The Skype Wi-Fi Phone has an on-screen menu that lets Skype users see who is online and available to talk, similar to what is seen on a PC. It can also be used to talk with non-Skype users. SkypeOut minutes can be used to call any phone for a low price and no monthly fee. The Skype Wi-Fi phone does not contain a web browser and so can not access hotspots, which require web-based login or authentication.[68]
Third-party developers, such as Truphone, Nimbuzz and Fring, have allowed Skype to run in parallel with several other competing VoIP/IM networks (Truphone and Nimbuzz provide truphoneOut and NimbuzzOut as a competing paid service) in any Symbian or Java environment. Nimbuzz has made Skype available to BlackBerry users. In July 2010, however, Fring disabled users from accessing Skype despite claiming that Skype themselves disabled the access;[69] Fring had provided mobile video calling over Skype as well as support for the Android platform. Nimbuzz discontinued support on request of Skype in October 2010.[70]
Until November 2010, only certain Samsung and Panasonic TVs offered Skype video service.[71]
[edit]System and software
[edit]Protocol
Main article: Skype protocol
Skype uses a proprietary Internet telephony (VoIP) network called the Skype protocol. The protocol has not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source. Part of the Skype technology relies on the Global Index P2P protocol belonging to the Joltid Ltd. corporation. The main difference between Skype and standard VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model (originally based on the Kazaa software[72]), rather than the more usual client–server model (note that the very popular SIP model of VoIP is also peer to peer, but implementation generally requires registration with a server, as does Skype).
[edit]Protocol detection and control
Many networking and security companies claim to detect and control Skype's protocol for enterprise and carrier applications. While the specific detection methods used by these companies are often private, Pearson's chi-square test and Naive Bayes classification are two approaches that were published in 2007.[73] Combining statistical measurements of payload properties (such as byte frequencies and initial byte sequences) as well as flow properties (like packet sizes and packet directions) has also shown to be an effective method for identifying Skype's TCP- and UDP-based protocols.[74]
[edit]User directory
The Skype user directory is sometimes claimed to be entirely decentralized and distributed among the nodes.[citation needed]
[edit]Audio codecs
Skype uses an array of different audio compression methods including G.729 and SVOPC. Skype added a Skype-created codec called SILK to Skype for Windows 4 and other Skype clients. SILK is intended to be "lightweight and embeddable".[75]
[edit]Video codecs
Unknown.
[edit]Client
There are versions for Linux, Linux-based Maemo, Symbian S60, Mac OS X (Intel and PPC), iOS (iPhone and iPod Touch), Android, Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7, Mobile), Sony PSP and also in 2010 TV models from Panasonic, Samsung and LG, but requires a special webcam built for those TVs.[76]
Skype 2.1, running on a Linux desktop
Skype 2.7, running on Mac OS X Leopard
Skype 1.0.2 running on iPhone
Skype 2.2, running on a Windows Mobile 6 device
Skype 1.0.0.831 running on an Android 2.2 device
Skype Mobile on Verizon 1.6.0.7 running on an Android 2.2 device
Skype 4 in Default View running on Windows Vista
Skype 4 in Default View running on Windows XP
[edit]Security and privacy
Main article: Skype security
Skype is a secure communication; encryption cannot be disabled, and is invisible to the user. Skype reportedly uses non-proprietary, widely trusted encryption techniques: RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations.[77] Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users with no proof of identity. Instead, a free choice of nicknames permits users to use the system without revealing their identity to other users. It is trivial to set up an account using any name; the displayed caller's name is no guarantee of authenticity. A third party paper analyzing the security and methodology of Skype was presented at Black Hat Europe 2006. It analyzed Skype and found a number of security issues with the current security model.[78]
Skype incorporates some features which tend to hide its traffic, but it is not specifically designed to thwart traffic analysis and therefore does not provide anonymous communication. Some researchers have been able to watermark the traffic so that it is identifiable even after passing through an anonymizing network.[79]
In an interview Kurt Sauer, the Chief Security Officer of Skype, said, "We provide a safe communication option. I will not tell you whether we can listen or not."[80] Skype's client uses an undocumented and proprietary protocol. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is concerned by user privacy issues arising from using proprietary software and protocols and has made a replacement for Skype one of their high priority projects.[81] Security researchers Biondi and Desclaux have speculated that Skype may have a back door, since Skype sends traffic even when it is turned off and because Skype has taken extreme measures to obfuscate their traffic and functioning of their program.[82] Several media sources have reported that at a meeting about the "Lawful interception of IP based services" held on 25 June 2008, high-ranking but not named officials at the Austrian interior ministry said that they could listen in on Skype conversations without problems. Austrian public broadcasting service ORF, citing minutes from the meeting, have reported that "the Austrian police are able to listen in on Skype connections".[83][84] Skype declined to comment on the reports.[85]
The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has interpreted the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) as requiring digital phone networks to allow wiretapping if authorized by an FBI warrant, in the same way as other phone services. In February 2009 Skype said that, not being a telephone company owning phone lines, it is exempt from CALEA and similar laws which regulate US phone companies, and in fact it is not clear whether Skype could support wiretapping even if it wanted to.[86] According to the ACLU, the Act is inconsistent with the original intent of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution;[87] more recently, the ACLU has expressed the concern that the FCC interpretation of the Act is incorrect.[88][89]
On 20 February 2009 the European Union's Eurojust agency announced that the Italian Desk at Eurojust would "play a key role in the coordination and cooperation of the investigations on the use of internet telephony systems (VoIP), such as 'Skype'. ... The purpose of Eurojust’s coordination role is to overcome the technical and judicial obstacles to the interception of internet telephony systems, taking into account the various data protection rules and civil rights"[90]
[edit]Service in the People's Republic of China
Since September 2007, users in China trying to download the Skype software client have been redirected to the site of TOM, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and Skype, from which a modified Chinese version can be downloaded.[91] The TOM client participates in China's system of Internet censorship, monitoring text messages between Skype users in China as well as messages exchanged with users outside the country.[92][93] Niklas Zennström, then chief executive of Skype, told reporters that TOM "had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing. Those are the regulations." He also stated: "One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users."[94] In October 2008, it was reported that TOM had been saving the full message contents of some Skype text conversations on its servers, apparently focusing on conversations containing political issues such as Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, and the Chinese Communist Party. The saved messages contain personally identifiable information about the messages' senders and recipients, including IP addresses, usernames, land line phone numbers, and the entire content of the text messages, including the time and date of each message. Information about Skype users outside China who were communicating with a TOM-Skype user was also saved. A server misconfiguration made these log files accessible to the public for a time.[93][95][96]
[edit]Customer service
There have been complaints about Skype's customer support.[97][98] As of May 2010, Skype does not provide any official means to contact customer support, apart from indirect assistance through its web portal only and contact email addresses.
There is no e-mail or phone number for complaints about billing errors. It is not clear, in case a dispute occurs, which country would be the jurisdiction for conflict resolution.[citation needed]
In January 2010 Skype rescinded their policy of seizing funds in Skype accounts that have been inactive (no paid call) for 180 days. This was in settlement to a class action lawsuit.[99] A settlement of up to US$4 was paid to persons who opted in to the action.
Skype's refund policy states that they will provide refunds in full if a client has used less than 1 euro of their Skype Credit. "Upon a duly submitted request, Skype will refund you on a pro rata basis for the unused period of a Product".
[edit]Outages and downtime
On 16 August 2007, Skype became unavailable to a majority of its users. Millions of users were requesting to log-in at the same time following a routine Windows update and this flooded the peer-to-peer system. The event lasted for about two days.[100]
On 22 December 2010, it was reported that Skype experienced an outage estimated to represent 8 million foregone calls.[101] Skype administrators placed the following message on their Twitter page: "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype -- we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations...engineers and site operations are working non-stop to get things back to normal."[102][103] The problem came down to the limited availability of "supernodes", affecting some versions of Skype.[104] Later in the day, Skype's CEO, Tony Bates, issued an apology. He said that the matter was being taken very seriously and was being thoroughly investigated. He had said that malicious attack was not being ruled out as a problem cause and he put his estimate of the foregone calls at about 10 million.[105] On 23 December 2010, Skype's blog with Tony Bates issued another apology through a video posted on YouTube for the Skype outage.[106] The problem persisted across the North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. It had started to subside by 8:30 pm UTC; however users were warned it might take several hours for the program to be fully operative again.[107] It was reported at 9:27 am 23 December UTC that most users were able to log in again although some still could not.[108] On the other hand into Thursday only about a third of the expected traffic was actually using Skype, relative to the time-period.[109] On 23 December 2010, Skype said on its blog that the system had stabilized, and a detailed explanation of the incident was published six days later.[110] Bates offered all Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay customers a free call to any landline as compensation.[111] Subscribers had their subscription extended by one week.
URL=Skype
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Skype
Skype 5.2 running on Windows 7
Developer(s) Skype Limited
Initial release August 2003
Stable release 5.2.60.113 (Windows)
5.1.0.914 (Mac OS X)
2.1.0.81 (Linux) (March 15, 2011; 22 days ago (Windows)
March 24, 2011; 13 days ago (Mac OS X)
January 20, 2010; 14 months ago (Linux)) [+/−]
Preview release [+/−]
Written in Embarcadero Delphi / Objective-C (Mac OS X/iPhone) / C++ with Qt4 (Linux)
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in Multilingual
Type Voice over Internet Protocol / instant messaging / videoconferencing
License Freeware (with some paid features)
Website Skype.com
Part of a series on
Skype
Skype Limited
Features of Skype
Skype protocol
Skype security
v · d · e
Skype (pronounced /ˈskaɪp/, a word-play on type) is a software application that allows users to make voice calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system. Skype has also become popular for its additional features which include instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing. Skype has 663 million registered users as of 2010.[1] The network is operated by Skype Limited, which has its headquarters in Luxembourg and is minority owned by eBay. Most of the development team of Skype is situated in Tallinn, Estonia.[2]
Unlike other VoIP services, Skype is a peer-to-peer system rather than a client–server system, and makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software; the original name proposed – Sky peer-to-peer – reflects this.
Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate,[3] government, home, and education networks,[4] citing reasons such as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage,[5] and security concerns.[6]
Contents [hide]
1 Features
2 History
3 Usage and traffic
4 Client applications and devices
5 System and software
5.1 Protocol
5.2 Protocol detection and control
5.3 User directory
5.4 Audio codecs
5.5 Video codecs
5.6 Client
6 Security and privacy
6.1 Service in the People's Republic of China
7 Customer service
8 Outages and downtime
9 See also
10 References
11 External links
[edit]Features
Main article: Features of Skype
Registered users of Skype are identified by a unique Skype Name, and may be listed in the Skype directory.[7] Skype allows these registered users to communicate through both instant messaging and voice chat. Voice chat allows calls between pairs of users and conference calling, and uses a proprietary audio codec. Skype's text chat client allows group chats, emoticons, storing chat history, offline messaging (since version 5) and editing of previous messages. The usual features familiar to instant messaging users—user profiles, online status indicators, and so on—are also included.
The Online Number (aka SkypeIn) service allows Skype users to receive calls on their computers dialed by regular phone subscribers to a local Skype phone number; local numbers are available for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[8][9] A Skype user can have local numbers in any of these countries, with calls to the number charged at the same rate as calls to fixed lines in the country.
Video conferencing between two users was introduced in January 2006 for the Windows and Mac OS X platform clients. Skype 2.0 for Linux, released on 13 March 2008, also features support for video conferencing.[10] Version 5 beta 1 for Windows, released 13 May 2010, offers free video conferencing with up to 5 people.[11]
Skype for Windows, starting with version 3.6.0.216, supports "High Quality Video" with quality and features, e.g., full-screen and screen-in-screen modes, similar to those of mid-range videoconferencing systems.[12] Skype audio conferences currently support up to 25 people at a time, including the host.
Skype does not provide the ability to call emergency numbers such as 911 in the United States and Canada, 111 in New Zealand, 000 in Australia, or 112 in Europe.[13] The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ruled that, for the purposes of section 255 of the Telecommunications Act, Skype is not an "interconnected VoIP provider".[14] As a result, the U.S. National Emergency Number Association recommends that all VoIP users have an analog line available as a backup.[15]
[edit]History
Skype was founded in 2003 by the Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Dane Janus Friis.[16] The Skype software was developed by Estonian developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn, the same individuals who together with Niklas and Janus were also originally behind the peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa.[17] In April 2003, Skype.com and Skype.net domain names were registered. In August 2003, the first public beta version was released.
One of the initial names for the project was "Sky peer-to-peer", which was then abbreviated to "Skyper". However, some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken.[18] Dropping the final "r" left the current title "Skype", for which domain names were available.[19]
In September 2005, SkypeOut was banned in South China.[20] In October of the same year, eBay purchased Skype[21] and in fall of 2009 sold a majority stake to an investor group.[22] In December 2005, videotelephony was introduced.[23]
In April 2006, the number of registered users reached 100 million. In October, Skype 2.0 for Mac was released, the first full release of Skype with video for Macintosh, and in December, Skype announced a new pricing structure, with connection fees for all SkypeOut calls.[24] Skype 3.0 for Windows was released.[25]
In 2006, a now-discontinued feature called "Skypecasting" was introduced. It allowed recordings of Skype voice over IP voice calls and teleconferences to be used as podcasts. Skypecasts remained in beta until its end. Skypecasts hosted public conference calls, up to 100 people at a time. Unlike ordinary Skype p2p conference calls, Skypecasts supported moderation features suitable for panel discussions, lectures, and town hall forums. Skype operated a directory of public Skypecasts. Skypecasts was discontinued as of 1 September 2008.[26]
Throughout 2007 updates (3.1, 3.2 and 3.5) added new features including Skype Find, Skype Prime, Send Money (which allowed users to send money via PayPal from one Skype user to another), video in mood, inclusion of video content in chat, call transfer to another person or a group, and auto-redial. Skype 2.7.0.49 (beta) for Mac OS X released adding availability of contacts in the Mac Address Book to the Skype contact list, auto redial, contact groups, public chat creation, and an in-window volume slider in the call window. During several days in August, Skype users were unable to connect to full Skype network in many countries[27] because of a Skype system-wide crash which was the result of exceptional number of logins after a Windows patch reboot ("Patch Tuesday").[28] And in November, there was controversy when it was announced that users having London (020) 7 numbers would lose them.[29]
In 2008, Skype released various updates including versions for the Sony PSP hand-held gaming system, version 2.0 for Linux with support for video-conferencing, and version 4 for Windows (with both a full screen[30] and a compact[31] mode). This version dropped support for the "Skype Me" presence indicator, which meant that a user was interested in receiving Skype calls from a non-contact. Skype also discontinued its SkypeCast service without explanation and added internal monthly and daily usage caps on their SkypeOut subscriptions, which had been advertised as "Unlimited". Many users and observers had commented on the high rate of dropped calls and the difficulty reconnecting dropped calls. Skype was used in the seventh season of the U.S. syndicated version of the British game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire in a new Ask the Expert video chat lifeline. In October, analysis revealed TOM-skype—the Chinese version of Skype run by TOM Online—sends content of text messages and encryption keys to monitoring servers.[32]
In 2009, Skype 4 was released,[33] the Linux client was updated, and Skype for SIP, a service aimed at business users, was launched. At that time around 35% of Skype's users were business users.[34] In April 2009, eBay announced plans to spin off Skype through an initial public offering in 2010.[35] In August, Joltid filed a motion with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to terminate a licensing agreement with eBay which allows eBay (and therefore Skype) to use the peer-to-peer communications technology on which Skype is based. If successful, this may have caused a shutdown of Skype in its current form.[36] In September, eBay announced the sale of 65% of Skype to a consortium of Index Ventures and Silver Lake Partners. Early in September, Skype had shut down the Extras developer program.[37] In November, eBay completed the sale of 70% of Skype to a consortium comprising Silver Lake Partners, CPPIB, Andreessen Horowitz, and the original founders valuing the business at USD2.75 billion.[22]
In 2010, a report by TeleGeography Research stated that Skype-to-Skype calls accounted for 13% of all international call minutes in 2009; out of the 406 billion international call minutes a total of 54 billion were used by Skype calls.[38] In May, Skype 5.0 beta was released, with support of group video calls with up to four participants. Also in May, Skype released an updated client for the Apple iPhone which allowed Skype calls to be made over a 3G network. Originally, a 3G call subscription plan was to be instituted in 2011, but the plan was eventually dropped by Skype.[39]
On 9 August 2010, Skype filed with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering.[40][41] In October 2010, Skype announced it had named Tony Bates as their CEO; Bates has been a senior VP at Cisco and responsible for its multi-billion-dollar enterprise, commercial and small business division.[42]
On 14 October 2010, Skype 5.0 for Windows was released with a number of improvements and feature additions, including a Facebook tab to allow users to SMS, chat with, or call their Facebook friends via Skype from the News Feed.[43] This version dropped support for the "Search for Skype Users" option.[44]
On 14 January 2011, Skype announced the acquisition of Qik which is a mobile video sharing platform.[45]
[edit]Usage and traffic
This article is outdated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. Please see the talk page for more information. (July 2010)
Date Total user accounts
(in millions)[46][47][48][49][50][51] Active users — daily presence
(in millions)[52] Skype to Skype minutes
(in billions) SkypeOut minutes
(in billions) Revenue USD
(in millions)
Q4 2005 74.7 10.8 N/A N/A N/A
Q1 2006 94.6 15.2 6.9 0.7 35
Q2 2006 113.1 16.6 7.1 0.8 44
Q3 2006 135.9 18.7 6.6 1.1 50
Q4 2006 171.2 21.2 7.6 1.5 66
Q1 2007 195.5 23.2 7.7 1.3 79
Q2 2007 219.6 23.9 7.1 1.3 90
Q3 2007 245.7 24.2 6.1 1.4 98
Q4 2007 276.3 27.0 11.9 1.6 115
Q1 2008 309.3 31.3 14.2 1.7 126
Q2 2008 338.2 32.0 14.8 1.9 136
Q3 2008 370 33.7 16.0 2.2 143
Q4 2008 405 36.5 20.5 2.6 145
Q1 2009 443 42.2 23.6 2.9 153
Q2 2009 483 – 25.5 3.0 170
Q3 2009 521 – 27.7 3.1 185
Q4 2010 663 - - - -
Users may have more than one account; it is not possible to count actual users, only accounts.
The volume of international traffic routed via Skype is significant. It has become the largest international voice carrier.[53]
Year International call market share
2005 2.9%[54]
2006 4.4%[54]
2008 8%[53]
2010 13%[38]
In January 2011, after the release of video calling on the Skype client for iPhone, Skype reached a record 27 million simultaneous online users.[55] This record was broken with 29 million simultaneous online users on February 21, 2011,[56] and again on March 28, 2011 with 30 million online users.[57]
[edit]Client applications and devices
Skype runs on a number of platforms, and on 29 October 2007, Skype launched its own mobile phone under the brand name 3 Skypephone, which runs a BREW OS.[58] Other platforms officially supported include:
Around 50 mobile phones, as of 2008[59]
The Nokia N800, N810 and N900 Internet Tablets, which use the Maemo environment
Both the Sony mylo COM-1 and COM-2 models
The PlayStation Portable Slim and Lite series, though the user needs to purchase a specially-designed microphone peripheral. The PSP-3000 has a built in microphone which allows communication without the Skype peripheral.[60] PSP Go has the ability to use Bluetooth connections with the Skype application, in addition to its built-in microphone.[61]
Mobile devices running Windows Mobile;[62] in February 2010, Skype announced its decision to discontinue development Skype for Windows Mobile.[63] In May 2010, Skype announced it would not develop a version of Skype for Windows Phone 7.[64]
Symbian; Skype version 5.0 is the latest version for the Symbian platform[65]
The X-Series together with mobile operator 3. However this uses a regular mobile phone call and iSkoot[66] to a Skype gateway, rather than mobile Internet. Other companies produce dedicated Skype phones which connect via WiFi
iOS, using an official application released on 31 March 2009. As of version 2.x, the iPhone application is capable of placing voice calls over 3G and EDGE networks. Skype originally announced it will charge a monthly fee for this feature at the start of 2011, but that was eventually dropped.[39] On December 29, Skype updated their iOS app to version 3.0, allowing mobile video calling.
A variety of BlackBerry and Android 3G Smartphones, through Verizon Wireless' Skype mobile service. Customers can receive Skype calls, instant messages and see friends' presence any time the phone is on. Skype usage isn't charged against customers’ monthly Verizon Wireless minute allowance when calling another Skype account (Skype-to-Skype). Customers in the U.S. use minutes from their calling plan when calling U.S. land lines or cell phones.[67]
Some devices are made to work with Skype by talking to a desktop Skype client or by embedding Skype software into the device. These are usually either tethered to a PC, or have a built-in Wi-Fi client to allow calling from Wi-Fi hotspots like the Netgear SPH101 Skype Wi-Fi Phone, the SMC WSKP100 Skype Wi-Fi Phone, the Belkin F1PP000GN-SK Wi-Fi Skype Phone, the Panasonic KX-WP1050 Wi-Fi Phone for Skype Executive Travel Set, the IPEVO So-20 Wi-Fi Phone for Skype and the Linksys CIT200 Wi-Fi Phone. There are also embedded cordless Skype phones based on DECT, which do not need a PC either, like the DUALphone 3088 from RTX. Netgear and SMC's Wi-Fi phones are considered the two major competitors in the market, with reviews of the Wi-Fi phones giving them equal coverage.[citation needed]
The Skype Wi-Fi Phone is a wireless mobile phone that allows users to make Skype calls, using a wireless Internet connection. The Skype Wi-Fi Phone has an on-screen menu that lets Skype users see who is online and available to talk, similar to what is seen on a PC. It can also be used to talk with non-Skype users. SkypeOut minutes can be used to call any phone for a low price and no monthly fee. The Skype Wi-Fi phone does not contain a web browser and so can not access hotspots, which require web-based login or authentication.[68]
Third-party developers, such as Truphone, Nimbuzz and Fring, have allowed Skype to run in parallel with several other competing VoIP/IM networks (Truphone and Nimbuzz provide truphoneOut and NimbuzzOut as a competing paid service) in any Symbian or Java environment. Nimbuzz has made Skype available to BlackBerry users. In July 2010, however, Fring disabled users from accessing Skype despite claiming that Skype themselves disabled the access;[69] Fring had provided mobile video calling over Skype as well as support for the Android platform. Nimbuzz discontinued support on request of Skype in October 2010.[70]
Until November 2010, only certain Samsung and Panasonic TVs offered Skype video service.[71]
[edit]System and software
[edit]Protocol
Main article: Skype protocol
Skype uses a proprietary Internet telephony (VoIP) network called the Skype protocol. The protocol has not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source. Part of the Skype technology relies on the Global Index P2P protocol belonging to the Joltid Ltd. corporation. The main difference between Skype and standard VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model (originally based on the Kazaa software[72]), rather than the more usual client–server model (note that the very popular SIP model of VoIP is also peer to peer, but implementation generally requires registration with a server, as does Skype).
[edit]Protocol detection and control
Many networking and security companies claim to detect and control Skype's protocol for enterprise and carrier applications. While the specific detection methods used by these companies are often private, Pearson's chi-square test and Naive Bayes classification are two approaches that were published in 2007.[73] Combining statistical measurements of payload properties (such as byte frequencies and initial byte sequences) as well as flow properties (like packet sizes and packet directions) has also shown to be an effective method for identifying Skype's TCP- and UDP-based protocols.[74]
[edit]User directory
The Skype user directory is sometimes claimed to be entirely decentralized and distributed among the nodes.[citation needed]
[edit]Audio codecs
Skype uses an array of different audio compression methods including G.729 and SVOPC. Skype added a Skype-created codec called SILK to Skype for Windows 4 and other Skype clients. SILK is intended to be "lightweight and embeddable".[75]
[edit]Video codecs
Unknown.
[edit]Client
There are versions for Linux, Linux-based Maemo, Symbian S60, Mac OS X (Intel and PPC), iOS (iPhone and iPod Touch), Android, Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7, Mobile), Sony PSP and also in 2010 TV models from Panasonic, Samsung and LG, but requires a special webcam built for those TVs.[76]
Skype 2.1, running on a Linux desktop
Skype 2.7, running on Mac OS X Leopard
Skype 1.0.2 running on iPhone
Skype 2.2, running on a Windows Mobile 6 device
Skype 1.0.0.831 running on an Android 2.2 device
Skype Mobile on Verizon 1.6.0.7 running on an Android 2.2 device
Skype 4 in Default View running on Windows Vista
Skype 4 in Default View running on Windows XP
[edit]Security and privacy
Main article: Skype security
Skype is a secure communication; encryption cannot be disabled, and is invisible to the user. Skype reportedly uses non-proprietary, widely trusted encryption techniques: RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations.[77] Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users with no proof of identity. Instead, a free choice of nicknames permits users to use the system without revealing their identity to other users. It is trivial to set up an account using any name; the displayed caller's name is no guarantee of authenticity. A third party paper analyzing the security and methodology of Skype was presented at Black Hat Europe 2006. It analyzed Skype and found a number of security issues with the current security model.[78]
Skype incorporates some features which tend to hide its traffic, but it is not specifically designed to thwart traffic analysis and therefore does not provide anonymous communication. Some researchers have been able to watermark the traffic so that it is identifiable even after passing through an anonymizing network.[79]
In an interview Kurt Sauer, the Chief Security Officer of Skype, said, "We provide a safe communication option. I will not tell you whether we can listen or not."[80] Skype's client uses an undocumented and proprietary protocol. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is concerned by user privacy issues arising from using proprietary software and protocols and has made a replacement for Skype one of their high priority projects.[81] Security researchers Biondi and Desclaux have speculated that Skype may have a back door, since Skype sends traffic even when it is turned off and because Skype has taken extreme measures to obfuscate their traffic and functioning of their program.[82] Several media sources have reported that at a meeting about the "Lawful interception of IP based services" held on 25 June 2008, high-ranking but not named officials at the Austrian interior ministry said that they could listen in on Skype conversations without problems. Austrian public broadcasting service ORF, citing minutes from the meeting, have reported that "the Austrian police are able to listen in on Skype connections".[83][84] Skype declined to comment on the reports.[85]
The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has interpreted the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) as requiring digital phone networks to allow wiretapping if authorized by an FBI warrant, in the same way as other phone services. In February 2009 Skype said that, not being a telephone company owning phone lines, it is exempt from CALEA and similar laws which regulate US phone companies, and in fact it is not clear whether Skype could support wiretapping even if it wanted to.[86] According to the ACLU, the Act is inconsistent with the original intent of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution;[87] more recently, the ACLU has expressed the concern that the FCC interpretation of the Act is incorrect.[88][89]
On 20 February 2009 the European Union's Eurojust agency announced that the Italian Desk at Eurojust would "play a key role in the coordination and cooperation of the investigations on the use of internet telephony systems (VoIP), such as 'Skype'. ... The purpose of Eurojust’s coordination role is to overcome the technical and judicial obstacles to the interception of internet telephony systems, taking into account the various data protection rules and civil rights"[90]
[edit]Service in the People's Republic of China
Since September 2007, users in China trying to download the Skype software client have been redirected to the site of TOM, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and Skype, from which a modified Chinese version can be downloaded.[91] The TOM client participates in China's system of Internet censorship, monitoring text messages between Skype users in China as well as messages exchanged with users outside the country.[92][93] Niklas Zennström, then chief executive of Skype, told reporters that TOM "had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing. Those are the regulations." He also stated: "One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users."[94] In October 2008, it was reported that TOM had been saving the full message contents of some Skype text conversations on its servers, apparently focusing on conversations containing political issues such as Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, and the Chinese Communist Party. The saved messages contain personally identifiable information about the messages' senders and recipients, including IP addresses, usernames, land line phone numbers, and the entire content of the text messages, including the time and date of each message. Information about Skype users outside China who were communicating with a TOM-Skype user was also saved. A server misconfiguration made these log files accessible to the public for a time.[93][95][96]
[edit]Customer service
There have been complaints about Skype's customer support.[97][98] As of May 2010, Skype does not provide any official means to contact customer support, apart from indirect assistance through its web portal only and contact email addresses.
There is no e-mail or phone number for complaints about billing errors. It is not clear, in case a dispute occurs, which country would be the jurisdiction for conflict resolution.[citation needed]
In January 2010 Skype rescinded their policy of seizing funds in Skype accounts that have been inactive (no paid call) for 180 days. This was in settlement to a class action lawsuit.[99] A settlement of up to US$4 was paid to persons who opted in to the action.
Skype's refund policy states that they will provide refunds in full if a client has used less than 1 euro of their Skype Credit. "Upon a duly submitted request, Skype will refund you on a pro rata basis for the unused period of a Product".
[edit]Outages and downtime
On 16 August 2007, Skype became unavailable to a majority of its users. Millions of users were requesting to log-in at the same time following a routine Windows update and this flooded the peer-to-peer system. The event lasted for about two days.[100]
On 22 December 2010, it was reported that Skype experienced an outage estimated to represent 8 million foregone calls.[101] Skype administrators placed the following message on their Twitter page: "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype -- we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations...engineers and site operations are working non-stop to get things back to normal."[102][103] The problem came down to the limited availability of "supernodes", affecting some versions of Skype.[104] Later in the day, Skype's CEO, Tony Bates, issued an apology. He said that the matter was being taken very seriously and was being thoroughly investigated. He had said that malicious attack was not being ruled out as a problem cause and he put his estimate of the foregone calls at about 10 million.[105] On 23 December 2010, Skype's blog with Tony Bates issued another apology through a video posted on YouTube for the Skype outage.[106] The problem persisted across the North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. It had started to subside by 8:30 pm UTC; however users were warned it might take several hours for the program to be fully operative again.[107] It was reported at 9:27 am 23 December UTC that most users were able to log in again although some still could not.[108] On the other hand into Thursday only about a third of the expected traffic was actually using Skype, relative to the time-period.[109] On 23 December 2010, Skype said on its blog that the system had stabilized, and a detailed explanation of the incident was published six days later.[110] Bates offered all Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay customers a free call to any landline as compensation.[111] Subscribers had their subscription extended by one week.
URL=Skype
Internet - Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an Americanpublic corporation with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides services via the Internet worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social mediawebsites and services.
Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of theboard of directors.
History and growth
Main article: History of Yahoo!
See also: Timeline of events for Yahoo!
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web".[3] David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".[4][5] The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.[6]
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it settled at a post-bubble low of $4.05 on 26 September 2001 (adjusted for splits).
In 2000, Yahoo! began using Google for search results. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. Yahoo! also revamped its mail service to compete with Google's Gmail in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for USD $44.6 billion. Yahoo! subsequently formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" Yahoo! and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo! had a stock market capitalization of USD $22.24 billion.[7] Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009
Products and services
Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services
Yahoo! operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gives users access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger.
[edit]Storing personal information and tracking usage
Working with comScore, The New York Times found that Yahoo! is able to collect far more data about Web users than its competitors from its Web sites and its advertising network. By one measure, on average Yahoo! had the potential in December 2007 to build a profile of 2,500 records per month about each of its visitors.[9]
As of May 22, 2008, An article in computer world states that Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse, which it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month, processing 24 billion events a day. Yahoo Claimed it is expected to grow in multiples of 10 petabytes by 2009 and that this database is the largest in the world.[10] In contrast the internal revenue services database of all taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.[10]
As of December 18, 2008, Yahoo! retains search requests for a period of 13 months. However, In response to European Regulators Yahoo scrambles the last eight digits of a users IP address after three months, rendering them partially anonymous.[11]
[edit]Communication
Yahoo! provides Internet communication services such as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail. In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.[12]
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz. In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Delicious and a handful of other products.[13]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo! announced that they would no longer provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intended to abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be similar to their Mash experimental system.[14]
[edit]Content
Yahoo! partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games to provide media content and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to combine their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds and information onto a single page.
On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! launched Shine, a site tailored for women seeking online information and advice between the ages of 25 and 54.[15]
[edit]Co-branded Internet services
Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.[specify][vague]
[edit]Mobile Services
Yahoo! Mobile offers services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging and mobile blogging; information services, search and alerts; entertainment, ring tones, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.
Yahoo! also introduced its Internet search system, called oneSearch, developed for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. The company's officials stated that in distinction from ordinary Web searches, Yahoo!'s new service presents a list of actual information, which may include: news headlines, images from Yahoo!'s Flickr photos site, business listings, local weather and links to other sites. Instead of showing only, for example, popular movies or some critical reviews, oneSearch lists local theaters that at the moment are playing a certain movie, user ratings and news headlines regarding the movie. A zip code or city name is required for Yahoo! oneSearch to start delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.[16]
Yahoo! uses Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.[17]
On October 8, 2010, Yahoo! announced plans to brings video chat to iPhones and Android-based phones via its popular Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service.[18]
[edit]Commerce
Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online. Yahoo! Auctions were discontinued in 2007 except for Asia.[19]
[edit]Small business
The Small Business homepage as of August 2010
Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email and Yahoo! Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo!'s tools.
Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.
[edit]Advertising
Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services on the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.[20]
Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007, called Panama. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through rates and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well as increase monetization—to earn more from the ads it shows.[21]
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!,[22] an online advertising management platform.[23] The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.[24]
[edit]Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies. It was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.
[edit]Yahoo! BOSS
Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology.[25] Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol.[26] On October 8, 2010, The Yahoo Search Blog announced BOSS is switching, as expected, to a paid model. They will charge on a cost-per-query model where the price will vary from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, will depend on if you are querying web, image, news or other information. Yahoo said they plan on offering BOSS v1, the free version, for free 60 days after BOSS v2, the paid version, is launched – which is expected in early 2011.[27]
[edit]Yahoo! Meme
Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
[edit]Yahoo! Koprol
Yahoo! Koprol is a Indonesian social networking based on location like GPS without any GPS devices.
[edit]Y!Connect
Y!Connect is a feature that enables individuals to leave comments in online publication boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with each individual publication. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.[28]
[edit]Closed down services
Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services#Closed/defunct services
Geocities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At one point it was the third-most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.[29] Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999, and ten years later, the web host was closed,[30] deleting millions of web pages in the process. A great deal of information was lost but many of those sites and pages have been mirrored at the Internet Archive,[31] "OOcities.com", and other such databases.[32]
Yahoo! Go, a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo! services, was closed down on January 12, 2010.[33]
Yahoo! 360° was a blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo! and closed on July 13, 2009.[34] Yahoo! Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.[35]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of integration with Flickr. Yahoo! Tech was a web site that provided product information and setup advice to users. Yahoo! launched the web site in May 2006. On March 11, 2010, Yahoo! closed down the service and redirected users to Yahoo!'s technology news section.[36] Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.[37]
[edit]Twitter slide leak on upcoming changes to Yahoo
On December 15, 2010, one day after Yahoo announced layoffs of 4% of its workers across their portfolio, MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier posted a slide from a Yahoo employee on Twitter. The slide was visible during an employee-only strategy webcast indicating changes in Yahoo's offerings.[38]
The following services were in a column under "Sunset": Yahoo Picks, Altavista, MyM, AllTheWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Under "Merge" was: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search, Sideline, and FireEagle.
11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the New Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad.[39] Yahoo's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving unofficially responded to the tweet implying that whoever sent him that particular slide is fired.[citation needed]
The blog on del.icio.us released a post by Chris Yeh after the leak, detailing that "Sunset" in their case doesn't necessarily mean they are closing down, and that other possibilities – including Delicious leaving Yahoo (through sale or spinoff) – are still on the table and that Delicious will not be closing down at this time; "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press."
URL=Yahoo
Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of theboard of directors.
History and growth
Main article: History of Yahoo!
See also: Timeline of events for Yahoo!
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web".[3] David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".[4][5] The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.[6]
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it settled at a post-bubble low of $4.05 on 26 September 2001 (adjusted for splits).
In 2000, Yahoo! began using Google for search results. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. Yahoo! also revamped its mail service to compete with Google's Gmail in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for USD $44.6 billion. Yahoo! subsequently formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" Yahoo! and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo! had a stock market capitalization of USD $22.24 billion.[7] Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009
Products and services
Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services
Yahoo! operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gives users access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger.
[edit]Storing personal information and tracking usage
Working with comScore, The New York Times found that Yahoo! is able to collect far more data about Web users than its competitors from its Web sites and its advertising network. By one measure, on average Yahoo! had the potential in December 2007 to build a profile of 2,500 records per month about each of its visitors.[9]
As of May 22, 2008, An article in computer world states that Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse, which it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month, processing 24 billion events a day. Yahoo Claimed it is expected to grow in multiples of 10 petabytes by 2009 and that this database is the largest in the world.[10] In contrast the internal revenue services database of all taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.[10]
As of December 18, 2008, Yahoo! retains search requests for a period of 13 months. However, In response to European Regulators Yahoo scrambles the last eight digits of a users IP address after three months, rendering them partially anonymous.[11]
[edit]Communication
Yahoo! provides Internet communication services such as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail. In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.[12]
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz. In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Delicious and a handful of other products.[13]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo! announced that they would no longer provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intended to abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be similar to their Mash experimental system.[14]
[edit]Content
Yahoo! partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games to provide media content and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to combine their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds and information onto a single page.
On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! launched Shine, a site tailored for women seeking online information and advice between the ages of 25 and 54.[15]
[edit]Co-branded Internet services
Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.[specify][vague]
[edit]Mobile Services
Yahoo! Mobile offers services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging and mobile blogging; information services, search and alerts; entertainment, ring tones, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.
Yahoo! also introduced its Internet search system, called oneSearch, developed for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. The company's officials stated that in distinction from ordinary Web searches, Yahoo!'s new service presents a list of actual information, which may include: news headlines, images from Yahoo!'s Flickr photos site, business listings, local weather and links to other sites. Instead of showing only, for example, popular movies or some critical reviews, oneSearch lists local theaters that at the moment are playing a certain movie, user ratings and news headlines regarding the movie. A zip code or city name is required for Yahoo! oneSearch to start delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.[16]
Yahoo! uses Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.[17]
On October 8, 2010, Yahoo! announced plans to brings video chat to iPhones and Android-based phones via its popular Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service.[18]
[edit]Commerce
Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online. Yahoo! Auctions were discontinued in 2007 except for Asia.[19]
[edit]Small business
The Small Business homepage as of August 2010
Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email and Yahoo! Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo!'s tools.
Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.
[edit]Advertising
Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services on the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.[20]
Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007, called Panama. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through rates and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well as increase monetization—to earn more from the ads it shows.[21]
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!,[22] an online advertising management platform.[23] The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.[24]
[edit]Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies. It was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.
[edit]Yahoo! BOSS
Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology.[25] Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol.[26] On October 8, 2010, The Yahoo Search Blog announced BOSS is switching, as expected, to a paid model. They will charge on a cost-per-query model where the price will vary from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, will depend on if you are querying web, image, news or other information. Yahoo said they plan on offering BOSS v1, the free version, for free 60 days after BOSS v2, the paid version, is launched – which is expected in early 2011.[27]
[edit]Yahoo! Meme
Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
[edit]Yahoo! Koprol
Yahoo! Koprol is a Indonesian social networking based on location like GPS without any GPS devices.
[edit]Y!Connect
Y!Connect is a feature that enables individuals to leave comments in online publication boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with each individual publication. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.[28]
[edit]Closed down services
Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services#Closed/defunct services
Geocities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At one point it was the third-most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.[29] Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999, and ten years later, the web host was closed,[30] deleting millions of web pages in the process. A great deal of information was lost but many of those sites and pages have been mirrored at the Internet Archive,[31] "OOcities.com", and other such databases.[32]
Yahoo! Go, a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo! services, was closed down on January 12, 2010.[33]
Yahoo! 360° was a blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo! and closed on July 13, 2009.[34] Yahoo! Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.[35]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of integration with Flickr. Yahoo! Tech was a web site that provided product information and setup advice to users. Yahoo! launched the web site in May 2006. On March 11, 2010, Yahoo! closed down the service and redirected users to Yahoo!'s technology news section.[36] Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.[37]
[edit]Twitter slide leak on upcoming changes to Yahoo
On December 15, 2010, one day after Yahoo announced layoffs of 4% of its workers across their portfolio, MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier posted a slide from a Yahoo employee on Twitter. The slide was visible during an employee-only strategy webcast indicating changes in Yahoo's offerings.[38]
The following services were in a column under "Sunset": Yahoo Picks, Altavista, MyM, AllTheWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Under "Merge" was: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search, Sideline, and FireEagle.
11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the New Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad.[39] Yahoo's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving unofficially responded to the tweet implying that whoever sent him that particular slide is fired.[citation needed]
The blog on del.icio.us released a post by Chris Yeh after the leak, detailing that "Sunset" in their case doesn't necessarily mean they are closing down, and that other possibilities – including Delicious leaving Yahoo (through sale or spinoff) – are still on the table and that Delicious will not be closing down at this time; "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press."
URL=Yahoo
Internet - Google
1995
Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about almost everything during this first meeting.
1996
Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university.
1997
Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google—a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Back to top
1998
August
Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn‘t exist yet: a company called Google Inc.
September
Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki‘s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.
Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company‘s name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim‘s check.
Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he‘s a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford.
December
“PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
Back to top
1999
February
We outgrow our garage office and move to new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just eight employees.
April
Yoshka, our first “company” dog, comes to work with our senior vice president of operations, Urs Hoelzle.
May
Omid Kordestani joins to run sales—the first non-engineering hire.
June
Our first press release announces a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board. The release quotes Moritz describing “Googlers” as ”people who use Google”.
August
We move to our first Mountain View location: 2400 E. Bayshore. Mountain View is a few miles south of Stanford University, and north of the older towns of Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose.
November
Charlie Ayers joins as Google’s first chef. He wins the job in a cook-off judged by the company‘s 40 employees. Previous claim to fame: catering for the Grateful Dead.
Back to top
2000
April
On April Fool‘s Day, we announce the MentalPlex: Google‘s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. Thus begins our annual foray in the Silicon Valley tradition of April 1 hoaxes.
May
The first 10 language versions of Google.com are released: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
We win our first Webby Awards: Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples’ Voice (voted by users).
June
We forge a partnership with Yahoo! to become their default search provider.
We announce the first billion-URL index and therefore Google becomes the world’s largest search engine.
September
We start offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing our total number of supported languages to 15.
October
Google AdWords launches with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback.
December
Google Toolbar is released. It’s a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google homepage.
Back to top
2001
January
We announce the hire of Silicon Valley veteran Wayne Rosing as our first VP of engineering operations.
February
Our first public acquisition: Deja.com’s Usenet Discussion Service, an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. We add search and browse features and launch it as Google Groups.
March
Eric Schmidt is named chairman of the board of directors.
Google.com is available in 26 languages.
April
Swedish Chef becomes a language preference.
July
Image Search launches, offering access to 250 million images.
August
We open our first international office, in Tokyo.
Eric Schmidt becomes our CEO. Larry and Sergey are named presidents of products and technology, respectively.
October
A new partnership with Universo Online (UOL) makes Google the major search service for millions of Latin Americans.
December
Keeping track: Our index size grows to 3 billion web documents.
Back to top
2002
February
Klingon becomes one of 72 language interfaces.
The first Google hardware is released: it’s a yellow box called the Google Search Appliance that businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their own documents.
We release a major overhaul for AdWords, including new cost-per-click pricing.
April
For April Fool‘s Day, we announce that pigeons power our search results.
We release a set of APIs, enabling developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and program in their favorite environment, including Java, Perl and Visual Studio.
May
We announce a major partnership with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com.
We release Google Labs, a place to try out beta technologies fresh from our R&D team.
September
Google News launches with 4000 news sources.
October
We open our first Australian office in Sydney.
December
You can now search for stuff to buy with Froogle (later called Google Product Search).
Back to top
2003
January
American Dialect Society members vote “google” the “most useful” Word of the Year for 2002.
February
We acquire Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger.
March
We announce a new content-targeted advertising service, enabling publishers large and small to access Google‘s vast network of advertisers. (Weeks later, on April 23, we acquire Applied Semantics, whose technology bolsters the service named AdSense.)
April
We launch Google Grants, our in-kind advertising program for nonprofit organizations to run in-kind ad campaigns for their cause.
October
Registration opens for programmers to compete for cash prizes and recognition at our first-ever Code Jam. Coders can work in Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.
December
We launch Google Print (which later becomes Google Book Search), indexing small excerpts from books to appear in search results.
Back to top
2004
January
orkut launches as a way for us to tap into the sphere of social networking.
February
Larry Page is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
Our search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images.
March
We move to our new “Googleplex” at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, giving 800+ employees a campus environment.
We formalize our enterprise unit with the hire of Dave Girouard as general manager; reporters begin reporting in April about our vision for the enterprise search business.
We introduce Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps and directions. (Later, Local is combined with Google Maps.)
April
For April Fools we announce plans to open the Googlunaplex, a new research facility on the Moon.
May
We announce the first winners of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship, awarded to outstanding women studying computer science. Today these scholarships are open to students in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe.
August
Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock takes place on Wall Street on August 18. Opening price: $85 per share.
September
There are more than 100 Google domains (Norway and Kenya are #102 and #103). The list has since grown to more than 150.
October
We formally open our office in Dublin, Ireland, with 150 multilingual Googlers, a visit from Sergey and Larry, and recognition from the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Mary Harney.
Google SMS (short message service) launches; send your text search queries to GOOGLE or 466453 on your mobile device.
Larry and Sergey are named Fellows by the Marconi Society, which recognizes “lasting scientific contributions to human progress in the field of communications science and the Internet.”
We spotlight our new engineering offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, India with a visit from Sergey and Larry.
Google Desktop Search is introduced: You can now search for files and documents stored on your hard drive using Google technology.
We launch the beta version of Google Scholar, a free service for searching scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
We acquire Keyhole, a digital mapping company whose technology will later become Google Earth.
November
Our index of web pages reaches 8 billion.
December
We open our Tokyo R&D (research & development) center to attract the best and brightest among Japanese and other Asian engineers.
The Google Print Program (since renamed Google Book Search) expands through digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and Oxford as well as the New York Public Library.
Back to top
2005
February
We hit a milestone in Image Search: 1.1 billion images indexed.
Google Maps goes live.
March
We launch code.google.com, a new place for developer-oriented resources, including all of our APIs.
Some 14,000 programmers from six countries compete for cash prizes and recognition at ourfirst coding competition in India, with top scores going to Ardian Kristanto Poernomo of Singapore.
We acquire Urchin, a web analytics company whose technology is used to create Google Analytics.
April
Our first Google Maps release in Europe is for the U.K.
For April Fool‘s, we announce a magical beverage that makes its imbibers more intelligent, and therefore better capable of properly using search results.
Google Maps now features satellite views and directions.
Google Local goes mobile, and includes SMS driving directions.
My Search History launches in Labs, allowing you to view all the web pages you‘ve visited and Google searches you‘ve made over time.
We release Site Targeting, an AdWords feature giving advertisers the ability to better target their ads to specific content sites.
May
We release Blogger Mobile, enabling bloggers to use their mobile phones to post and send photos to their blogs.
Google Scholar adds support for institutional access: Searchers can now locate journal articles within their own libraries.
Personalized Homepage (now iGoogle) is designed for people to customize their own Google homepage with content modules they choose.
June
We hold our first Summer of Code, a 3-month $2 million program that aims to help computer science students contribute to open source software development.
Google Mobile Web Search is released, specially formulated for viewing search results on mobile phones.
We unveil Google Earth: a satellite imagery-based mapping service combining 3D buildings and terrain with mapping capabilities and Google search.
We release Personalized Search in Labs: over time, your (opt-in) search history will closely reflect your interests.
API for Maps released; developers can embed Google Maps on many kinds of mapping services and sites.
August
Google scores well in the U.S. government‘s 2005 machine translation evaluation. (We‘ve done so in subsequent years as well.)
We launch Google Talk, a downloadable Windows application that enables you to talk or IM with friends quickly and easily, as well as talk using a computer microphone and speaker (no phone required) for free.
September
Overlays in Google Earth illuminate the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Some rescue teams use these tools to locate stranded victims.
DARPA veteran Vint Cerf joins Google to carry on his quest for a global open Internet.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee begins work at our new Research and Development Center in China.
Google Blog Search goes live; it‘s the way to find current and relevant blog postings on particular topics throughout the enormous blogosphere.
October
Feed aficionados rejoice as Google Reader, a feed reader, is introduced at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
Googlers volunteer to produce the first Mountain View book event with Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” Since then, the Authors@Google program has hosted more than 480 authors in 12 offices across the U.S., Europe and India.
November
We release Google Analytics, formerly known as Urchin, for measuring the impact of websites and marketing campaigns.
We announce the opening of our first offices in São Paulo and Mexico City.
December
Google Transit launches in Labs. People in the Portland, Oregon metro area can now plan their trips on public transportation at one site.
Gmail for mobile launches in the United States.
Back to top
2006
January
Our first Code Jam in China concludes in Beijing. The winner, graduate student Chuan Xu, is one of more than 13,000 registrants.
We announce the acquisition of dMarc, a digital radio advertising company.
Google.cn, a local domain version of Google, goes live in China.
We introduce Picasa in 25 more languages, including Polish, Thai and Vietnamese.
February
We release Chat in Gmail, using the instant messaging tools from Google Talk.
Eric Schmidt is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Larry Brilliant becomes the executive director of Google.org, our philanthropic arm.
Google News for mobile launches.
March
We announce the acquisition of Writely, a web-based word processing application that subsequently becomes the basis for Google Docs.
A team working from Mountain View, Bangalore and New York collaborates to create Google Finance, our approach to an improved search experience for financial information.
April
For April Fool‘s we unveil a new product, Google Romance: “Dating is a search problem.”
We launch Google Calendar, complete with sharing and group features.
We release Maps for France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
May
We release Google Trends, a way to visualize the popularity of searches over time.
June
We announce Picasa Web Albums, allowing your to upload and share your photos online.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) adds “Google” as a verb.
We announce Google Checkout, a fast and easy way to pay for online purchases.
Gmail, Google News and iGoogle become available on mobile phones in eight more languages besides English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.
Gmail launches in Arabic and Hebrew, bringing the number of interfaces up to 40.
July
At Google Code Jam Europe, nearly 10,000 programmers from 31 countries compete at Google Dublin for the top prizes; Tomasz Czajka from Poland wins the final round.
August
We launch free citywide WiFi in Mountain View.
More than 100 libraries on 10 campuses of the University of California join the Google BooksLibrary Project.
Star Trek‘s 40th Anniversary Convention in Las Vegas features a Google booth showcasing tools appropriate for intergalactic use.
Apps for Your Domain, a suite of applications designed for organizations of all sizes, and including including Gmail and Calendar, is released.
Google Book Search begins offering free PDF downloads of books in the public domain.
September
We add an archive search to Google News, with more than 200 years of historical articles.
Featured Content for Google Earth includes overlays from the UN Environmental Program, Discovery Networks, the Jane Goodall Institute and the National Park Service.
The University Complutense of Madrid becomes the first Spanish-language library to join theGoogle Books Library Project.
October
Together with LitCam and UNESCO‘s Institute for Lifelong Learning, we launch the Literacy Project, offering resources for teachers, literacy groups and anyone interested in reading promotion.
We announce our acquisition of YouTube.
We release web-based applications Docs & Spreadsheets: Word processor Docs is a reworking of Writely (acquired in March).
Google Custom Search Engine launches, giving bloggers and website owners the ability to create a search engine tailored to their own interests.
We acquire JotSpot, a collaborative wiki platform, which later becomes Google Sites.
November
The first nationwide Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.K. takes place with the theme My Britain. More than 15,000 kids in Britain enter, and 13-year old Katherine Chisnall is chosen to have her doodle displayed on www.google.co.uk. There have been Doodle 4 Google contests in several other years and countries since.
December
We release Patent Search in the U.S., indexing more than 7 million patents dating back to 1790.
Back to top
2007
January
We announce a partnership with China Mobile, the world‘s largest mobile telecom carrier, to provide mobile and Internet search services in China.
February
We release Google Maps in Australia, complete with local business results and mobile capability.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets is available in eleven more languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian.
For Valentine‘s Day, we open up Gmail to everyone. (Previously, it was available by invitation only.)
Google Apps Premier Edition launches, bringing cloud computing to businesses.
The Candidates@Google series kicks off with Senator Hillary Clinton, the first of several 2008 Presidential candidates, including Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, to visit the Googleplex.
We introduce traffic information to Google Maps for more than 30 cities around the U.S.
March
Our first Latin American software coding contest ends with Fábio Dias Moreira of Brazil taking the grand prize. He scored more points than 5,000 other programmers from all over the continent.
We sign partnerships to give free access to Google Apps for Education to 70,000 university students in Kenya and Rwanda.
April
This April Fool‘s Day is extra busy: not only do we introduce the Gmail Paper Archive and TiSP(Toilet Internet Service Provider)—we lose (and find) a real snake in our New York office!
We add eight more languages to Blogger, bringing the total to 19.
May
In partnership with the Growing Connection, we plant a vegetable garden in the middle of the Googleplex, the output of which is incorporated into our café offerings.
We move into permanent space in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Governor Jennifer Granholm helps us celebrate. The office is an AdWords support site.
At our Searchology event, we announce new strides taken towards universal search. Now video, news, books, image and local results are all integrated together in one search result.
Google Hot Trends launches, listing the current 100 most active queries, showing what people are searching for at the moment.
Street View debuts in Google Maps in five U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.
On Developer Day, we announce Google Gears (now known just as Gears), an open source technology for creating offline web applications.
June
Google Maps gets prime placement on the original Apple iPhone.
YouTube becomes available in nine more domains: Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland and the U.K.
We announce a partnership with Salesforce.com, combining that company‘s on-demand CRM applications with AdWords.
We unveil several “green” initiatives: RechargeIT, aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the completion of our installation of solar panels at the Googleplex, in Mountain View, and our intention to be completely carbon-neutral by the end of 2007. We alsoannounce the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, in collaboration with Intel, Dell and more than 30 other companies.
Google Earth Outreach is introduced, designed to help nonprofit organizations use Google Earthto advocate their causes.
July
We announce the acquisition of Postini.
The first CNN/YouTube debate takes place between the eight U.S. Democratic Presidential candidates. (The Republicans get their turn in November 2007.)
Google Finance becomes available for non-U.S. markets for the first time, in Canada.
Google Apps is now available in 28 languages.
August
We ask your for you interpretation of how Gmail travels around the world, and receive more than 1,100 video responses from more than 65 different countries.
To infinity and beyond! Sky launches inside Google Earth, including layers for constellation information and virtual tours of galaxies.
September
AdSense for Mobile is introduced, giving sites optimized for mobile browsers the ability to host the same ads as standard websites.
Together with the X PRIZE Foundation we announce the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon for a $30 million prize purse.
We add Presently, a new application for making slide presentations, to Google Docs.
Google Reader becomes available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (U.K.), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese and Korean.
October
We partner with IBM on a supercomputing initiative so that students can learn to work at Internet scale on computing challenges.
November
We announce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks.
Android, the first open platform for mobile devices, and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. Soon after, we introduce the $10 million Android Developer Challenge.
Google.org announces RE
December
The Queen of England launches The Royal Channel on YouTube. She is the first monarch to establish a video presence this way.
Back to top
2008
January
Google.org announces five key initiatives: in addition to the previously-announced RE
We bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction to ensure that a more open wireless world becomes available to consumers.
February
For people searching in Hebrew, Arabic, or other right-to-left languages, we introduce a featureaimed at making searches easier by detecting the direction of a query.
Google Sites, a revamp of the acquisition JotSpot, debuts. Sites enables you to create collaborative websites with embedded videos, documents and calendars.
March
We finally complete the acquisition deal for DoubleClick.
Together with Yahoo and MySpace, we announce the OpenSocial Foundation, an independent non-profit group designed to provide transparency and operational guidelines around the open software tools for social computing.
April
We feature 16 April Fool‘s jokes from our offices around the world, including the new airline announced with Sir Richard Branson (Virgle), AdSense for Conversations, a Manpower Search(China) and the Google Wake-Up Kit. Bonus foolishness: all viewers linking to YouTube-featured videos are “Rickrolled.”
A new version of Google Earth launches, incorporating Street View and 12 more languages. At the same time, KML 2.2, which began as the Google Earth file format, is accepted as an official Open Geospacial Consortium standard.
Google Website Optimizer comes out of beta, expanding from an AdWords-only product. It‘s a free website-testing tool with which site owners can continually test different combinations of their website content (such as images and text), to see which ones yield the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
We launch Google Finance China allowing Chinese investors to get stock and mutual fund data as a result of this collaboration between our New York and Shanghai teams.
We introduce a collection of 70+ new themes (“skins”) for iGoogle, contributed by such artists and designers as Dale Chihuly, Oscar de la Renta, Kwon Ki-Soo and Philippe Starck.
May
Following both the Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma), Google Earth adds new satellite information for the region(s) to help recovery efforts.
Reflecting our commitment to searchers worldwide, Google search now supports Unicode 5.1.
At a developer event, we preview Google FriendConnect, a set of functions and applications enabling website owners to easily make their sites social by adding registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting and reviews, plus applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
With IPv4 addresses (the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet) running low, Google search becomes available over IPv6, a new IP address space large enough to assign almost three billion networks to every person on the planet. Vint Cerf is a key proponent of broad and immediate adoption of IPv6.
Google Translate adds 10 more languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish), bringing the total to 23.
We release Google Health to the public, allowing people to safely and securely collect, store and manage their medical records and health information online.
We introduce a series of blog posts detailing the many aspects of good search results on the Official Google Blog.
California 6th grader Grace Moon wins the U.S. 2008 Doodle 4 Google competition for her doodle “Up In The Clouds.”
June
Real-time stock quotes go live on Google Finance for the first time.
With the launch of Google Site Search, site owners can enable Google-powered searches on their own websites.
We launch Gmail Labs, a set of experimental Gmail features, including saved searches and different kinds of stars, which let you customize your Gmail experience.
A new version of Maps for Mobile debuts, putting Google Transit directions on phones in more than 50 cities worldwide.
For the first time, Google engineers create the problems for contestants to solve at the 7th Annual Code Jam competition.
July
We provide Street View for the entire 2008 Tour de France route—the first launch of Street View imagery in Europe.
Our first downloadable iPhone app, featuring My Location and word suggestions for quicker mobile searching, debuts with the launch of the Apple 3G iPhone.
We work with the band Radiohead to make a music video of their song “House of Cards,” using only data, and not cameras.
Our indexing system for processing links indicates that we now count 1 trillion unique URLs (and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day).
August
Street View is available in several cities in Japan and Australia—the first time it‘s appeared outside of North America or Europe.
Google Suggest feature arrives on Google.com, helping formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and reduce keystrokes.
Just in time for the U.S. political conventions, we launch a site dedicated to the 2008 U.S. elections, with news, video and photos as well as tools for teachers and campaigners.
September
Word gets out about Chrome a bit ahead of schedule when the comic book that introduces ournew open source browser is released earlier than planned on September 1. The browser officially becomes available for worldwide download a day later.
We get involved with the U.S. political process at the presidential nominating conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties.
We release an upgrade for Picasa, including new editing tools, a movie maker and easier syncing with the web. At the same time, Picasa Web Albums is updated with a new feature allowing you to ”name tag” people in photos.
Google News Archive helps to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online bypartnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.
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We launch Transit for the New York metro region, making public transit information easily available for users of the largest transportation agency in the U.S.
Thanks to all of you, Google celebrates 10 fast-paced years.
October
We release the first draft of Clean Energy 2030, a proposal to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity use and to reduce oil use by cars 40 percent by 2030. The plan could generate billions in savings as well as millions of “green jobs.”
We introduce Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch, complete with photos, geo-located Wikipedia articles and the ability to tilt your phone to view 3D terrain.
Googlers in Mountain View build a zip line to travel across the small Permanente Creek separating a few of our buildings.
November
In a vote by 5-0, the FCC formally agrees to open up “white spaces,” or unused television spectrum, for wireless broadband service. We see this decision as a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications.
After we discover a correlation between certain search queries and CDC data on flu symptoms, we release Google Flu Trends, an indicator of flu activity around the U.S. as much as two weeks earlier than traditional flu surveillance systems.
We announce the availability of the LIFE photo archive in Google Image Search. Only a fraction of the approximately 10 million photos have ever been seen before.
SearchWiki launches, a way for you to customize your own search experience by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on search results. Comments can also be read by other users.
December
We invite musicians around the globe to audition to participate in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the world‘s first collaborative online orchestra.
Google Friend Connect is available to any webmaster looking to easily integrate social features into their site.
Street View coverage more than doubles in the United States, including several states never before seen on Street View (Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota and South Dakota).
We partner with publishers to digitize millions of magazine articles and make them readily available on Google Book Search.
Back to top
2009
January
We kick off January with the launch of Picasa for Mac at Macworld.
The Vatican launches a YouTube Channel, providing updates from the Pope and Catholic Church.
Together with the New America Foundation‘s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium and academic researchers, we announce Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that provides tools to test broadband connections.
February
The latest version of Google Earth makes a splash with Ocean, a new feature that provides a 3D look at the ocean floor and information about one of the world‘s greatest natural resources.
We introduce Google Latitude, a Google Maps for mobile feature and an iGoogle gadget that lets you share your location with friends and see the approximate location of people who have decided to share their location with you.
After adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese and Galician, Google Translate is capable of automatic translation between 41 languages, covering 98 percent of the languages read by Internet users.
Our first message on Twitter gets back to binary: I‘m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010. (Hint: it‘s a button on our homepage.)
March
We launch a beta test of interest-based advertising on partner sites and on YouTube. This kind of tailored advertising lets us show ads more closely related to what people are searching for, and it gives advertisers an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products or services.
We release Google Voice to existing Grand Central users. The new application improves the way you use your phone, with features like voicemail transcription and archive and search of all of your SMS text messages.
We celebrate our San Francisco office‘s Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council‘sLEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. We see it as a sign that we‘re on track with our approach to building environmentally friendly offices.
The White House holds an online town hall to answer citizens‘ questions submitted on Google Moderator.
We launch new iGoogle backdrops inspired by video games, including classics like “Mario,” “Zelda” and “Donkey Kong.”
We announce Google Ventures: a venture capital fund aimed at using our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies.
Using our transliteration technology, we build and release a feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type messages in Indian languages like Hindi or Malayalam.
Google Suggest goes local with keyword suggestions for 51 languages in 155 domains.
April
Our April Fool‘s Day prank this year is CADIE, our “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” who spends the day taking over various Google products before self-destructing.
We announce an update to search which enables people to get localized results even if they don‘t include a location in their search query.
For India‘s 15th general election, we launch the Google India Elections Centre, where people can check to see if they‘re registered to vote, find their polling place, as well as read news and other information.
Over 90 musicians from around the world—including a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player—perform in the first-ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
We rebuild and redesign Google Labs as well as release two new Labs: Similar Image search and Google News Timeline. Later in the month, we introduce Toolbar Labs.
We begin to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. search pages when people search for names, giving people more control over what others find about them when they search on Google.
We release 11 short films about Google Chrome made by Christoph Niemann, Motion Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul and Pantograph.
May
To clear brush and reduce fire hazard in the fields near our Mountain View headquarters, we rent some goats from a local company. They help us trim the grass the low-carbon way!
At our second Searchology event, we introduce a few new search features, including the Search Options panel and rich snippets in search results.
We launch Sky Map for Android, which uses your Android phone to help you identify stars, constellations and planets.
Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, winsthe second U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition with her doodle “A new beginning.”
At our second annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, we preview Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration tool.
June
We add a new dashboard to Google Places which gives business owners information, such as what people searched for to see their listing or how many times their listing appeared in search results, about how customers find their businesses in Google Maps.
We introduce two new ways to customize your iGoogle page: the iGoogle Showcase, which lets you see your favorite celebrities‘ homepages look like and add gadgets and more from those pages to your own, and nature themes.
Google Squared, a new experiment in Labs intended for certain kinds of complex search queries, collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.
The Google Translator Toolkit is a new set of editing tools that helps people translate and publish work in other languages faster and at a higher quality. Our automatic translation system also learns from any corrections.
We announce All for Good. It‘s a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations that‘s developed using App Engine and Google Base. Many Googlers contributed to the open source project in their 20 percent time.
We release a beta version of AdSense for Mobile Applications, which allows developers to earn revenue by displaying text and image ads in iPhone and Android applications.
Google SMS is a suite of mobile applications that allows people in Africa to access information—like health and agriculture tips, news and local weather—using SMS on their mobile phones, and includes a marketplace application for finding buyers and sellers of goods.
July
Both the enterprise and consumer versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk are now out of beta.
We announce that we‘re developing the Google Chrome OS, an open source, lightweight operating system initially targeted at netbooks.
We launch Moon in Google Earth on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The tool features lunar imagery, information about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts and narrated tours.
The new comics themes for iGoogle range from classic strips like Peanuts to heroes like Batman to alternative comics from all over the world.
We add a search options panel to Google Images, making it easier to find the types of images you need.
August
Any active U.S. service member is invited to sign up for a Google Voice account, to help them keep in better touch with family and friends, especially when deployed abroad.
We announce a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a high-quality video compression technology company.
New social features come to iGoogle, including social gaming, media-sharing and to-do list gadgets as well as an update feed for friends‘ activities.
Google Insights for Search is now available in 39 languages around the world. While we‘re at it, we introduce a forecasting feature and an animated map.
We expand the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos, so you can monetize your viral video and earn revenue even if you aren‘t a member of the Partnership Program.
We add Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish to Google Translate, bringing the total number of supported languages to 51—that‘s 2,550 language pairs!
September
We celebrate the birthday of a product nearly as old as Google itself: Blogger. More than 300 million people visit the blogging site every month, and we‘re proud that it continues to be a medium for people around the world to freely express themselves.
The search box on our classic homepage gets bigger.
FastFlip, an experiment in Google Labs, lets you quickly browse through recent news, headlines and popular topics like a print magazine, while at the same time offering some of the benefits of online news, like aggregation and search over many top publications, personalization and the ability to share content with your friends.
We acquire reCAPTCHA, a technology company focused on Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—the process that converts scanned images into plain text.
In an effort to create a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone, we introduce theDoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.
On the birthday of the “father of science fiction,” we unveil the truth behind a mysterious series of doodles in tribute to H.G. Wells.
We introduce Place Pages to Google Maps: one page that organizes all the relevant information about a business, point of interest, transit station, neighborhood, landmark or city—in any part of the world—in one place. Place Pages include rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.
October
We begin a series of posts on the Official Google Blog dedicated to the latest and greatest in the world of Google search.
Flu Trends, our flu surveillance tool, is now available in 16 additional countries and in 37 languages.
We introduce BuildingMaker, a tool for creating buildings for Google Earth that lets you construct a model of a building using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes.
We announce an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
Social Search, a new experiment on Google Labs, helps you find relevant public content from your friends and contacts right in your Google search results.
Google Maps Navigation, our turn-by-turn GPS navigation system, includes 3D views and voice guidance—and because it‘s connected to the Google cloud, it always includes the newest map data, lets you search by voice or along a route, and provides live traffic data.
A new search feature helps you find music information on the web. When you enter the name of a song, artist or album, or even a snippet of lyrics, your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners.
November
The Google Dashboard provides you with greater transparency and control over the data associated with your Google Account.
A new series on the Official Google Blog covers what’s new in Google Apps.
We add full-text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts to Google Scholar. We think this addition will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.
An experimental feature in Labs called Image Swirl builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.
By combining automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system, we offer automatic captions in YouTube. Captions can help the deaf and hearing impaired, enable people around the world to access video content through machine translation, improve search and enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they‘re looking for.
A few months after announcing our open source operating system project, we open-source the project as Chromium OS in order to engage with partners, the open source community and developers.
December
A new homepage design shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons upon first loading, and reveals other links on the homepage, such as Gmail or Image Search, when the user moves the mouse.
Google Public DNS is part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster. A DNS resolver converts easy-to-remember domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers so that computers can communicate with one another.
With our new real-time search feature, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter, as well as news headlines and blog posts published just seconds before your search—right on the search results page.
Just in time for the holidays, we roll out Mac and Linux versions of Google Chrome, as well as extensions for Chrome in Windows and Linux (all in beta).
Living Stories, developed in partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post, is an experimental format prototype for presenting online news. (We ended this experiment in February 2010, and open-sourced the code for anyone to use.)
We introduce a few new features to Google Toolbar, including an easy way to share any page on the web, shortened by a new URL shortener (goo.gl).
For the first time, YouTube reveals official Most-Watched lists and some of its fastest-rising search terms for the past year.
Back to top
2010
January
We introduce Nexus One, an exemplar of what‘s possible on mobile devices through Android, as well as a Google-hosted web store aimed at providing people with an easier way to buy a mobile phone.
Now, you can upload all file types, including large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and more to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online.
We state our new approach to business in China: Google will no longer censor search results on Google.cn, and we will work to determine how we might operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if possible.
On International Data Privacy Day, we publish our privacy principles. We‘ve always operated under these principles, but now codify them to share our thinking as we create new technologies.
February
The first-ever Google Super Bowl ad tells a love story through search terms. This is one ofmany videos made to celebrate the human quests behind search.
In time for the Winter Games in Vancouver, we introduce Street View imagery of Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, gathered with a special camera-equipped snowmobile.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting—like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind—built into Gmail and for mobile.
We introduce Safety Mode in YouTube, an opt-in setting to help screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don‘t want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube.
We announce a plan to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks, delivering Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, in a small number of trial locations across the United States.
We acquire Aardvark, a company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.
The next generation of ad-serving technology for online publishers, DoubleClick for Publishersand DFP Small Business, combines Google‘s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick‘s display advertising and ad serving experience.
March
We acquire Picnik, a site enabling you to edit your photos in the cloud, without leaving your browser.
Stars in search is a new feature that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content.
The Google Apps Marketplace is a new online store for integrated business applications that allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.
Bike directions and bike trail data come to Google Maps.
Following the January announcement about search in China, we stop censoring our search services–Google Search, Google News and Google Images–on Google.cn, instead redirecting users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.
April
For April Fool‘s Day, we change our name to Topeka. The change is a tribute to Topeka, Kansas, which changed its name to Google as part of an effort to bring our experimental fiber network to that city.
Scientists announce a significant new hominid fossil discovery, made with help from Google Earth, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa.
New features for real-time search include the ability to search the archive of public tweets and “replay” the conversation from a particular moment in time, as well as a tool called Google Follow Finder that helps you find new people to follow.
Google Places (formerly the Local Business Center) gets a new name along with some new features, like showing service areas and, in some cities, the ability to use an easy advertising program called Tags.
We launch a Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world.
With Earth view in Google Maps, you can explore Google Earth’s detailed 3D imagery and terrain directly in Google Maps, on your browser.
Oregon becomes the first state to open up Google Apps for Education to public schools throughout the state.
May
As part of our efforts to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, we make our first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project.
In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we provide Google Earth imagery of the spill’s spread.
We roll out a refreshed look for our search results, with a new, contextual left-hand panel that highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query.
A team of Googlers in London create a photomosaic of the Google logo. (Later, this project becomes the inspiration for a company contest.)
At Google I/O, we announce Google TV, which is built on Android and Chrome and gives you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. We’re busy at I/O this year, with a handful of other announcements and updates.
In celebration of PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, we release our first-ever playable doodle, complete with all 256 levels and Ms. PAC-MAN. It’s so popular we soon give it a permanent home.
You have the option to search more securely with SSL-encrypted Google web search.
We release a report on our economic impact in the United States: in 2009, we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits.
The 2010 Doodle 4 Google winner in the U.S. is third grader Mackenzie Melton, for her doodle “Rainforest Habitat.”
We officially acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company.
June
You can now personalize your Google.com with a background image.
With help from the Marin Bee Company, we install the Hiveplex–four bee hives painted in Google’s colors, situated in a flowered area on our campus. We have our first honey harvestlater in the year.
We collaborate with the Guggenheim Museum on a global online initiative, called YouTube Play: A Biennal of Creative Video, to discover the most creative video in the world.
We catch football fever, offering ways for fans to stay on top of the 2010 World Cup as well as a lot of thorough analysis of soccer search trends.
Caffeine, our new indexing system, provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and is the largest collection of web content we‘ve offered.
Google Voice is now available to anyone in the U.S.
We stop redirecting Chinese users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk. Instead, we provide a landing page where users can use Google.cn services that we can provide without filtering, and/or click through to Google.com.hk for search.
The Google News homepage is redesigned to make your view of news more relevant and easier for you to share interesting stories.
July
We sign an agreement to acquire ITA, a software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times, availability and prices.
“Life in a Day” is a cinematic experiment to document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world.
We acquire Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world.
We announce an agreement to purchase the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy Resources Story County II facility in Iowa.
Google Images gets a new look, designed to make it easier for you to take advantage of some of the powerful technology behind Images.
Google Apps for Government, our newest edition of Google Apps, includes the same Google applications offered to businesses and everyday users, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.
August
We will not continue to develop Google Wave as a standalone product.
We acquire Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.
With Verizon, we announce a joint policy proposal for an open Internet.
Voice Actions for Android are a series of voice commands that let you control your phone just by speaking.
If you’re in the U.S., you can now call any phone directly from Gmail.
Realtime Search gets a new standalone homepage, along with more tools for exploring and refining real-time results.
“The Wilderness Downtown” is a musical experience created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google, built with Google Chrome in mind using HTML5 and other technologies.
Priority Inbox, an experimental way of handling information overload in Gmail, automatically sorts your email by importance, using a variety of signals.
September
We celebrate Google Chrome’s second birthday with a new release of the browser that’s three times faster than the original beta.
Google Instant predicts what you’re interested in and shows you search results as you type so you can quickly get to the information you’re looking for.
Our new Family Safety Center is a one-stop shop with info for parents and teachers on how to keep kids safe online.
A new online Transparency Report gives people tools to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked.
Google News turns eight.
We announce the five winners of Project 10^100.
We celebrate the 50th anniversary of “The Flintstones” with a Google doodle.
Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica imagery comes to Street View. Now, three years after we first launched Street View in five U.S. cities, you can explore all seven continents at eye level!
URL=History
Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about almost everything during this first meeting.
1996
Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university.
1997
Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google—a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Back to top
1998
August
Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn‘t exist yet: a company called Google Inc.
September
Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki‘s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.
Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company‘s name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim‘s check.
Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he‘s a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford.
December
“PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
Back to top
1999
February
We outgrow our garage office and move to new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just eight employees.
April
Yoshka, our first “company” dog, comes to work with our senior vice president of operations, Urs Hoelzle.
May
Omid Kordestani joins to run sales—the first non-engineering hire.
June
Our first press release announces a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board. The release quotes Moritz describing “Googlers” as ”people who use Google”.
August
We move to our first Mountain View location: 2400 E. Bayshore. Mountain View is a few miles south of Stanford University, and north of the older towns of Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose.
November
Charlie Ayers joins as Google’s first chef. He wins the job in a cook-off judged by the company‘s 40 employees. Previous claim to fame: catering for the Grateful Dead.
Back to top
2000
April
On April Fool‘s Day, we announce the MentalPlex: Google‘s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. Thus begins our annual foray in the Silicon Valley tradition of April 1 hoaxes.
May
The first 10 language versions of Google.com are released: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
We win our first Webby Awards: Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples’ Voice (voted by users).
June
We forge a partnership with Yahoo! to become their default search provider.
We announce the first billion-URL index and therefore Google becomes the world’s largest search engine.
September
We start offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing our total number of supported languages to 15.
October
Google AdWords launches with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback.
December
Google Toolbar is released. It’s a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google homepage.
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2001
January
We announce the hire of Silicon Valley veteran Wayne Rosing as our first VP of engineering operations.
February
Our first public acquisition: Deja.com’s Usenet Discussion Service, an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. We add search and browse features and launch it as Google Groups.
March
Eric Schmidt is named chairman of the board of directors.
Google.com is available in 26 languages.
April
Swedish Chef becomes a language preference.
July
Image Search launches, offering access to 250 million images.
August
We open our first international office, in Tokyo.
Eric Schmidt becomes our CEO. Larry and Sergey are named presidents of products and technology, respectively.
October
A new partnership with Universo Online (UOL) makes Google the major search service for millions of Latin Americans.
December
Keeping track: Our index size grows to 3 billion web documents.
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2002
February
Klingon becomes one of 72 language interfaces.
The first Google hardware is released: it’s a yellow box called the Google Search Appliance that businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their own documents.
We release a major overhaul for AdWords, including new cost-per-click pricing.
April
For April Fool‘s Day, we announce that pigeons power our search results.
We release a set of APIs, enabling developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and program in their favorite environment, including Java, Perl and Visual Studio.
May
We announce a major partnership with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com.
We release Google Labs, a place to try out beta technologies fresh from our R&D team.
September
Google News launches with 4000 news sources.
October
We open our first Australian office in Sydney.
December
You can now search for stuff to buy with Froogle (later called Google Product Search).
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2003
January
American Dialect Society members vote “google” the “most useful” Word of the Year for 2002.
February
We acquire Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger.
March
We announce a new content-targeted advertising service, enabling publishers large and small to access Google‘s vast network of advertisers. (Weeks later, on April 23, we acquire Applied Semantics, whose technology bolsters the service named AdSense.)
April
We launch Google Grants, our in-kind advertising program for nonprofit organizations to run in-kind ad campaigns for their cause.
October
Registration opens for programmers to compete for cash prizes and recognition at our first-ever Code Jam. Coders can work in Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.
December
We launch Google Print (which later becomes Google Book Search), indexing small excerpts from books to appear in search results.
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2004
January
orkut launches as a way for us to tap into the sphere of social networking.
February
Larry Page is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
Our search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images.
March
We move to our new “Googleplex” at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, giving 800+ employees a campus environment.
We formalize our enterprise unit with the hire of Dave Girouard as general manager; reporters begin reporting in April about our vision for the enterprise search business.
We introduce Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps and directions. (Later, Local is combined with Google Maps.)
April
For April Fools we announce plans to open the Googlunaplex, a new research facility on the Moon.
May
We announce the first winners of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship, awarded to outstanding women studying computer science. Today these scholarships are open to students in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe.
August
Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock takes place on Wall Street on August 18. Opening price: $85 per share.
September
There are more than 100 Google domains (Norway and Kenya are #102 and #103). The list has since grown to more than 150.
October
We formally open our office in Dublin, Ireland, with 150 multilingual Googlers, a visit from Sergey and Larry, and recognition from the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Mary Harney.
Google SMS (short message service) launches; send your text search queries to GOOGLE or 466453 on your mobile device.
Larry and Sergey are named Fellows by the Marconi Society, which recognizes “lasting scientific contributions to human progress in the field of communications science and the Internet.”
We spotlight our new engineering offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, India with a visit from Sergey and Larry.
Google Desktop Search is introduced: You can now search for files and documents stored on your hard drive using Google technology.
We launch the beta version of Google Scholar, a free service for searching scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
We acquire Keyhole, a digital mapping company whose technology will later become Google Earth.
November
Our index of web pages reaches 8 billion.
December
We open our Tokyo R&D (research & development) center to attract the best and brightest among Japanese and other Asian engineers.
The Google Print Program (since renamed Google Book Search) expands through digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and Oxford as well as the New York Public Library.
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2005
February
We hit a milestone in Image Search: 1.1 billion images indexed.
Google Maps goes live.
March
We launch code.google.com, a new place for developer-oriented resources, including all of our APIs.
Some 14,000 programmers from six countries compete for cash prizes and recognition at ourfirst coding competition in India, with top scores going to Ardian Kristanto Poernomo of Singapore.
We acquire Urchin, a web analytics company whose technology is used to create Google Analytics.
April
Our first Google Maps release in Europe is for the U.K.
For April Fool‘s, we announce a magical beverage that makes its imbibers more intelligent, and therefore better capable of properly using search results.
Google Maps now features satellite views and directions.
Google Local goes mobile, and includes SMS driving directions.
My Search History launches in Labs, allowing you to view all the web pages you‘ve visited and Google searches you‘ve made over time.
We release Site Targeting, an AdWords feature giving advertisers the ability to better target their ads to specific content sites.
May
We release Blogger Mobile, enabling bloggers to use their mobile phones to post and send photos to their blogs.
Google Scholar adds support for institutional access: Searchers can now locate journal articles within their own libraries.
Personalized Homepage (now iGoogle) is designed for people to customize their own Google homepage with content modules they choose.
June
We hold our first Summer of Code, a 3-month $2 million program that aims to help computer science students contribute to open source software development.
Google Mobile Web Search is released, specially formulated for viewing search results on mobile phones.
We unveil Google Earth: a satellite imagery-based mapping service combining 3D buildings and terrain with mapping capabilities and Google search.
We release Personalized Search in Labs: over time, your (opt-in) search history will closely reflect your interests.
API for Maps released; developers can embed Google Maps on many kinds of mapping services and sites.
August
Google scores well in the U.S. government‘s 2005 machine translation evaluation. (We‘ve done so in subsequent years as well.)
We launch Google Talk, a downloadable Windows application that enables you to talk or IM with friends quickly and easily, as well as talk using a computer microphone and speaker (no phone required) for free.
September
Overlays in Google Earth illuminate the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Some rescue teams use these tools to locate stranded victims.
DARPA veteran Vint Cerf joins Google to carry on his quest for a global open Internet.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee begins work at our new Research and Development Center in China.
Google Blog Search goes live; it‘s the way to find current and relevant blog postings on particular topics throughout the enormous blogosphere.
October
Feed aficionados rejoice as Google Reader, a feed reader, is introduced at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
Googlers volunteer to produce the first Mountain View book event with Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” Since then, the Authors@Google program has hosted more than 480 authors in 12 offices across the U.S., Europe and India.
November
We release Google Analytics, formerly known as Urchin, for measuring the impact of websites and marketing campaigns.
We announce the opening of our first offices in São Paulo and Mexico City.
December
Google Transit launches in Labs. People in the Portland, Oregon metro area can now plan their trips on public transportation at one site.
Gmail for mobile launches in the United States.
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2006
January
Our first Code Jam in China concludes in Beijing. The winner, graduate student Chuan Xu, is one of more than 13,000 registrants.
We announce the acquisition of dMarc, a digital radio advertising company.
Google.cn, a local domain version of Google, goes live in China.
We introduce Picasa in 25 more languages, including Polish, Thai and Vietnamese.
February
We release Chat in Gmail, using the instant messaging tools from Google Talk.
Eric Schmidt is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Larry Brilliant becomes the executive director of Google.org, our philanthropic arm.
Google News for mobile launches.
March
We announce the acquisition of Writely, a web-based word processing application that subsequently becomes the basis for Google Docs.
A team working from Mountain View, Bangalore and New York collaborates to create Google Finance, our approach to an improved search experience for financial information.
April
For April Fool‘s we unveil a new product, Google Romance: “Dating is a search problem.”
We launch Google Calendar, complete with sharing and group features.
We release Maps for France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
May
We release Google Trends, a way to visualize the popularity of searches over time.
June
We announce Picasa Web Albums, allowing your to upload and share your photos online.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) adds “Google” as a verb.
We announce Google Checkout, a fast and easy way to pay for online purchases.
Gmail, Google News and iGoogle become available on mobile phones in eight more languages besides English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.
Gmail launches in Arabic and Hebrew, bringing the number of interfaces up to 40.
July
At Google Code Jam Europe, nearly 10,000 programmers from 31 countries compete at Google Dublin for the top prizes; Tomasz Czajka from Poland wins the final round.
August
We launch free citywide WiFi in Mountain View.
More than 100 libraries on 10 campuses of the University of California join the Google BooksLibrary Project.
Star Trek‘s 40th Anniversary Convention in Las Vegas features a Google booth showcasing tools appropriate for intergalactic use.
Apps for Your Domain, a suite of applications designed for organizations of all sizes, and including including Gmail and Calendar, is released.
Google Book Search begins offering free PDF downloads of books in the public domain.
September
We add an archive search to Google News, with more than 200 years of historical articles.
Featured Content for Google Earth includes overlays from the UN Environmental Program, Discovery Networks, the Jane Goodall Institute and the National Park Service.
The University Complutense of Madrid becomes the first Spanish-language library to join theGoogle Books Library Project.
October
Together with LitCam and UNESCO‘s Institute for Lifelong Learning, we launch the Literacy Project, offering resources for teachers, literacy groups and anyone interested in reading promotion.
We announce our acquisition of YouTube.
We release web-based applications Docs & Spreadsheets: Word processor Docs is a reworking of Writely (acquired in March).
Google Custom Search Engine launches, giving bloggers and website owners the ability to create a search engine tailored to their own interests.
We acquire JotSpot, a collaborative wiki platform, which later becomes Google Sites.
November
The first nationwide Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.K. takes place with the theme My Britain. More than 15,000 kids in Britain enter, and 13-year old Katherine Chisnall is chosen to have her doodle displayed on www.google.co.uk. There have been Doodle 4 Google contests in several other years and countries since.
December
We release Patent Search in the U.S., indexing more than 7 million patents dating back to 1790.
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2007
January
We announce a partnership with China Mobile, the world‘s largest mobile telecom carrier, to provide mobile and Internet search services in China.
February
We release Google Maps in Australia, complete with local business results and mobile capability.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets is available in eleven more languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian.
For Valentine‘s Day, we open up Gmail to everyone. (Previously, it was available by invitation only.)
Google Apps Premier Edition launches, bringing cloud computing to businesses.
The Candidates@Google series kicks off with Senator Hillary Clinton, the first of several 2008 Presidential candidates, including Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, to visit the Googleplex.
We introduce traffic information to Google Maps for more than 30 cities around the U.S.
March
Our first Latin American software coding contest ends with Fábio Dias Moreira of Brazil taking the grand prize. He scored more points than 5,000 other programmers from all over the continent.
We sign partnerships to give free access to Google Apps for Education to 70,000 university students in Kenya and Rwanda.
April
This April Fool‘s Day is extra busy: not only do we introduce the Gmail Paper Archive and TiSP(Toilet Internet Service Provider)—we lose (and find) a real snake in our New York office!
We add eight more languages to Blogger, bringing the total to 19.
May
In partnership with the Growing Connection, we plant a vegetable garden in the middle of the Googleplex, the output of which is incorporated into our café offerings.
We move into permanent space in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Governor Jennifer Granholm helps us celebrate. The office is an AdWords support site.
At our Searchology event, we announce new strides taken towards universal search. Now video, news, books, image and local results are all integrated together in one search result.
Google Hot Trends launches, listing the current 100 most active queries, showing what people are searching for at the moment.
Street View debuts in Google Maps in five U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.
On Developer Day, we announce Google Gears (now known just as Gears), an open source technology for creating offline web applications.
June
Google Maps gets prime placement on the original Apple iPhone.
YouTube becomes available in nine more domains: Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland and the U.K.
We announce a partnership with Salesforce.com, combining that company‘s on-demand CRM applications with AdWords.
We unveil several “green” initiatives: RechargeIT, aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the completion of our installation of solar panels at the Googleplex, in Mountain View, and our intention to be completely carbon-neutral by the end of 2007. We alsoannounce the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, in collaboration with Intel, Dell and more than 30 other companies.
Google Earth Outreach is introduced, designed to help nonprofit organizations use Google Earthto advocate their causes.
July
We announce the acquisition of Postini.
The first CNN/YouTube debate takes place between the eight U.S. Democratic Presidential candidates. (The Republicans get their turn in November 2007.)
Google Finance becomes available for non-U.S. markets for the first time, in Canada.
Google Apps is now available in 28 languages.
August
We ask your for you interpretation of how Gmail travels around the world, and receive more than 1,100 video responses from more than 65 different countries.
To infinity and beyond! Sky launches inside Google Earth, including layers for constellation information and virtual tours of galaxies.
September
AdSense for Mobile is introduced, giving sites optimized for mobile browsers the ability to host the same ads as standard websites.
Together with the X PRIZE Foundation we announce the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon for a $30 million prize purse.
We add Presently, a new application for making slide presentations, to Google Docs.
Google Reader becomes available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (U.K.), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese and Korean.
October
We partner with IBM on a supercomputing initiative so that students can learn to work at Internet scale on computing challenges.
November
We announce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks.
Android, the first open platform for mobile devices, and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. Soon after, we introduce the $10 million Android Developer Challenge.
Google.org announces RE
December
The Queen of England launches The Royal Channel on YouTube. She is the first monarch to establish a video presence this way.
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2008
January
Google.org announces five key initiatives: in addition to the previously-announced RE
We bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction to ensure that a more open wireless world becomes available to consumers.
February
For people searching in Hebrew, Arabic, or other right-to-left languages, we introduce a featureaimed at making searches easier by detecting the direction of a query.
Google Sites, a revamp of the acquisition JotSpot, debuts. Sites enables you to create collaborative websites with embedded videos, documents and calendars.
March
We finally complete the acquisition deal for DoubleClick.
Together with Yahoo and MySpace, we announce the OpenSocial Foundation, an independent non-profit group designed to provide transparency and operational guidelines around the open software tools for social computing.
April
We feature 16 April Fool‘s jokes from our offices around the world, including the new airline announced with Sir Richard Branson (Virgle), AdSense for Conversations, a Manpower Search(China) and the Google Wake-Up Kit. Bonus foolishness: all viewers linking to YouTube-featured videos are “Rickrolled.”
A new version of Google Earth launches, incorporating Street View and 12 more languages. At the same time, KML 2.2, which began as the Google Earth file format, is accepted as an official Open Geospacial Consortium standard.
Google Website Optimizer comes out of beta, expanding from an AdWords-only product. It‘s a free website-testing tool with which site owners can continually test different combinations of their website content (such as images and text), to see which ones yield the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
We launch Google Finance China allowing Chinese investors to get stock and mutual fund data as a result of this collaboration between our New York and Shanghai teams.
We introduce a collection of 70+ new themes (“skins”) for iGoogle, contributed by such artists and designers as Dale Chihuly, Oscar de la Renta, Kwon Ki-Soo and Philippe Starck.
May
Following both the Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma), Google Earth adds new satellite information for the region(s) to help recovery efforts.
Reflecting our commitment to searchers worldwide, Google search now supports Unicode 5.1.
At a developer event, we preview Google FriendConnect, a set of functions and applications enabling website owners to easily make their sites social by adding registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting and reviews, plus applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
With IPv4 addresses (the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet) running low, Google search becomes available over IPv6, a new IP address space large enough to assign almost three billion networks to every person on the planet. Vint Cerf is a key proponent of broad and immediate adoption of IPv6.
Google Translate adds 10 more languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish), bringing the total to 23.
We release Google Health to the public, allowing people to safely and securely collect, store and manage their medical records and health information online.
We introduce a series of blog posts detailing the many aspects of good search results on the Official Google Blog.
California 6th grader Grace Moon wins the U.S. 2008 Doodle 4 Google competition for her doodle “Up In The Clouds.”
June
Real-time stock quotes go live on Google Finance for the first time.
With the launch of Google Site Search, site owners can enable Google-powered searches on their own websites.
We launch Gmail Labs, a set of experimental Gmail features, including saved searches and different kinds of stars, which let you customize your Gmail experience.
A new version of Maps for Mobile debuts, putting Google Transit directions on phones in more than 50 cities worldwide.
For the first time, Google engineers create the problems for contestants to solve at the 7th Annual Code Jam competition.
July
We provide Street View for the entire 2008 Tour de France route—the first launch of Street View imagery in Europe.
Our first downloadable iPhone app, featuring My Location and word suggestions for quicker mobile searching, debuts with the launch of the Apple 3G iPhone.
We work with the band Radiohead to make a music video of their song “House of Cards,” using only data, and not cameras.
Our indexing system for processing links indicates that we now count 1 trillion unique URLs (and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day).
August
Street View is available in several cities in Japan and Australia—the first time it‘s appeared outside of North America or Europe.
Google Suggest feature arrives on Google.com, helping formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and reduce keystrokes.
Just in time for the U.S. political conventions, we launch a site dedicated to the 2008 U.S. elections, with news, video and photos as well as tools for teachers and campaigners.
September
Word gets out about Chrome a bit ahead of schedule when the comic book that introduces ournew open source browser is released earlier than planned on September 1. The browser officially becomes available for worldwide download a day later.
We get involved with the U.S. political process at the presidential nominating conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties.
We release an upgrade for Picasa, including new editing tools, a movie maker and easier syncing with the web. At the same time, Picasa Web Albums is updated with a new feature allowing you to ”name tag” people in photos.
Google News Archive helps to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online bypartnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.
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We launch Transit for the New York metro region, making public transit information easily available for users of the largest transportation agency in the U.S.
Thanks to all of you, Google celebrates 10 fast-paced years.
October
We release the first draft of Clean Energy 2030, a proposal to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity use and to reduce oil use by cars 40 percent by 2030. The plan could generate billions in savings as well as millions of “green jobs.”
We introduce Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch, complete with photos, geo-located Wikipedia articles and the ability to tilt your phone to view 3D terrain.
Googlers in Mountain View build a zip line to travel across the small Permanente Creek separating a few of our buildings.
November
In a vote by 5-0, the FCC formally agrees to open up “white spaces,” or unused television spectrum, for wireless broadband service. We see this decision as a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications.
After we discover a correlation between certain search queries and CDC data on flu symptoms, we release Google Flu Trends, an indicator of flu activity around the U.S. as much as two weeks earlier than traditional flu surveillance systems.
We announce the availability of the LIFE photo archive in Google Image Search. Only a fraction of the approximately 10 million photos have ever been seen before.
SearchWiki launches, a way for you to customize your own search experience by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on search results. Comments can also be read by other users.
December
We invite musicians around the globe to audition to participate in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the world‘s first collaborative online orchestra.
Google Friend Connect is available to any webmaster looking to easily integrate social features into their site.
Street View coverage more than doubles in the United States, including several states never before seen on Street View (Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota and South Dakota).
We partner with publishers to digitize millions of magazine articles and make them readily available on Google Book Search.
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2009
January
We kick off January with the launch of Picasa for Mac at Macworld.
The Vatican launches a YouTube Channel, providing updates from the Pope and Catholic Church.
Together with the New America Foundation‘s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium and academic researchers, we announce Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that provides tools to test broadband connections.
February
The latest version of Google Earth makes a splash with Ocean, a new feature that provides a 3D look at the ocean floor and information about one of the world‘s greatest natural resources.
We introduce Google Latitude, a Google Maps for mobile feature and an iGoogle gadget that lets you share your location with friends and see the approximate location of people who have decided to share their location with you.
After adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese and Galician, Google Translate is capable of automatic translation between 41 languages, covering 98 percent of the languages read by Internet users.
Our first message on Twitter gets back to binary: I‘m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010. (Hint: it‘s a button on our homepage.)
March
We launch a beta test of interest-based advertising on partner sites and on YouTube. This kind of tailored advertising lets us show ads more closely related to what people are searching for, and it gives advertisers an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products or services.
We release Google Voice to existing Grand Central users. The new application improves the way you use your phone, with features like voicemail transcription and archive and search of all of your SMS text messages.
We celebrate our San Francisco office‘s Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council‘sLEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. We see it as a sign that we‘re on track with our approach to building environmentally friendly offices.
The White House holds an online town hall to answer citizens‘ questions submitted on Google Moderator.
We launch new iGoogle backdrops inspired by video games, including classics like “Mario,” “Zelda” and “Donkey Kong.”
We announce Google Ventures: a venture capital fund aimed at using our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies.
Using our transliteration technology, we build and release a feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type messages in Indian languages like Hindi or Malayalam.
Google Suggest goes local with keyword suggestions for 51 languages in 155 domains.
April
Our April Fool‘s Day prank this year is CADIE, our “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” who spends the day taking over various Google products before self-destructing.
We announce an update to search which enables people to get localized results even if they don‘t include a location in their search query.
For India‘s 15th general election, we launch the Google India Elections Centre, where people can check to see if they‘re registered to vote, find their polling place, as well as read news and other information.
Over 90 musicians from around the world—including a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player—perform in the first-ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
We rebuild and redesign Google Labs as well as release two new Labs: Similar Image search and Google News Timeline. Later in the month, we introduce Toolbar Labs.
We begin to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. search pages when people search for names, giving people more control over what others find about them when they search on Google.
We release 11 short films about Google Chrome made by Christoph Niemann, Motion Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul and Pantograph.
May
To clear brush and reduce fire hazard in the fields near our Mountain View headquarters, we rent some goats from a local company. They help us trim the grass the low-carbon way!
At our second Searchology event, we introduce a few new search features, including the Search Options panel and rich snippets in search results.
We launch Sky Map for Android, which uses your Android phone to help you identify stars, constellations and planets.
Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, winsthe second U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition with her doodle “A new beginning.”
At our second annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, we preview Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration tool.
June
We add a new dashboard to Google Places which gives business owners information, such as what people searched for to see their listing or how many times their listing appeared in search results, about how customers find their businesses in Google Maps.
We introduce two new ways to customize your iGoogle page: the iGoogle Showcase, which lets you see your favorite celebrities‘ homepages look like and add gadgets and more from those pages to your own, and nature themes.
Google Squared, a new experiment in Labs intended for certain kinds of complex search queries, collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.
The Google Translator Toolkit is a new set of editing tools that helps people translate and publish work in other languages faster and at a higher quality. Our automatic translation system also learns from any corrections.
We announce All for Good. It‘s a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations that‘s developed using App Engine and Google Base. Many Googlers contributed to the open source project in their 20 percent time.
We release a beta version of AdSense for Mobile Applications, which allows developers to earn revenue by displaying text and image ads in iPhone and Android applications.
Google SMS is a suite of mobile applications that allows people in Africa to access information—like health and agriculture tips, news and local weather—using SMS on their mobile phones, and includes a marketplace application for finding buyers and sellers of goods.
July
Both the enterprise and consumer versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk are now out of beta.
We announce that we‘re developing the Google Chrome OS, an open source, lightweight operating system initially targeted at netbooks.
We launch Moon in Google Earth on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The tool features lunar imagery, information about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts and narrated tours.
The new comics themes for iGoogle range from classic strips like Peanuts to heroes like Batman to alternative comics from all over the world.
We add a search options panel to Google Images, making it easier to find the types of images you need.
August
Any active U.S. service member is invited to sign up for a Google Voice account, to help them keep in better touch with family and friends, especially when deployed abroad.
We announce a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a high-quality video compression technology company.
New social features come to iGoogle, including social gaming, media-sharing and to-do list gadgets as well as an update feed for friends‘ activities.
Google Insights for Search is now available in 39 languages around the world. While we‘re at it, we introduce a forecasting feature and an animated map.
We expand the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos, so you can monetize your viral video and earn revenue even if you aren‘t a member of the Partnership Program.
We add Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish to Google Translate, bringing the total number of supported languages to 51—that‘s 2,550 language pairs!
September
We celebrate the birthday of a product nearly as old as Google itself: Blogger. More than 300 million people visit the blogging site every month, and we‘re proud that it continues to be a medium for people around the world to freely express themselves.
The search box on our classic homepage gets bigger.
FastFlip, an experiment in Google Labs, lets you quickly browse through recent news, headlines and popular topics like a print magazine, while at the same time offering some of the benefits of online news, like aggregation and search over many top publications, personalization and the ability to share content with your friends.
We acquire reCAPTCHA, a technology company focused on Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—the process that converts scanned images into plain text.
In an effort to create a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone, we introduce theDoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.
On the birthday of the “father of science fiction,” we unveil the truth behind a mysterious series of doodles in tribute to H.G. Wells.
We introduce Place Pages to Google Maps: one page that organizes all the relevant information about a business, point of interest, transit station, neighborhood, landmark or city—in any part of the world—in one place. Place Pages include rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.
October
We begin a series of posts on the Official Google Blog dedicated to the latest and greatest in the world of Google search.
Flu Trends, our flu surveillance tool, is now available in 16 additional countries and in 37 languages.
We introduce BuildingMaker, a tool for creating buildings for Google Earth that lets you construct a model of a building using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes.
We announce an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
Social Search, a new experiment on Google Labs, helps you find relevant public content from your friends and contacts right in your Google search results.
Google Maps Navigation, our turn-by-turn GPS navigation system, includes 3D views and voice guidance—and because it‘s connected to the Google cloud, it always includes the newest map data, lets you search by voice or along a route, and provides live traffic data.
A new search feature helps you find music information on the web. When you enter the name of a song, artist or album, or even a snippet of lyrics, your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners.
November
The Google Dashboard provides you with greater transparency and control over the data associated with your Google Account.
A new series on the Official Google Blog covers what’s new in Google Apps.
We add full-text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts to Google Scholar. We think this addition will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.
An experimental feature in Labs called Image Swirl builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.
By combining automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system, we offer automatic captions in YouTube. Captions can help the deaf and hearing impaired, enable people around the world to access video content through machine translation, improve search and enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they‘re looking for.
A few months after announcing our open source operating system project, we open-source the project as Chromium OS in order to engage with partners, the open source community and developers.
December
A new homepage design shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons upon first loading, and reveals other links on the homepage, such as Gmail or Image Search, when the user moves the mouse.
Google Public DNS is part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster. A DNS resolver converts easy-to-remember domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers so that computers can communicate with one another.
With our new real-time search feature, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter, as well as news headlines and blog posts published just seconds before your search—right on the search results page.
Just in time for the holidays, we roll out Mac and Linux versions of Google Chrome, as well as extensions for Chrome in Windows and Linux (all in beta).
Living Stories, developed in partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post, is an experimental format prototype for presenting online news. (We ended this experiment in February 2010, and open-sourced the code for anyone to use.)
We introduce a few new features to Google Toolbar, including an easy way to share any page on the web, shortened by a new URL shortener (goo.gl).
For the first time, YouTube reveals official Most-Watched lists and some of its fastest-rising search terms for the past year.
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2010
January
We introduce Nexus One, an exemplar of what‘s possible on mobile devices through Android, as well as a Google-hosted web store aimed at providing people with an easier way to buy a mobile phone.
Now, you can upload all file types, including large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and more to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online.
We state our new approach to business in China: Google will no longer censor search results on Google.cn, and we will work to determine how we might operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if possible.
On International Data Privacy Day, we publish our privacy principles. We‘ve always operated under these principles, but now codify them to share our thinking as we create new technologies.
February
The first-ever Google Super Bowl ad tells a love story through search terms. This is one ofmany videos made to celebrate the human quests behind search.
In time for the Winter Games in Vancouver, we introduce Street View imagery of Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, gathered with a special camera-equipped snowmobile.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting—like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind—built into Gmail and for mobile.
We introduce Safety Mode in YouTube, an opt-in setting to help screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don‘t want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube.
We announce a plan to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks, delivering Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, in a small number of trial locations across the United States.
We acquire Aardvark, a company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.
The next generation of ad-serving technology for online publishers, DoubleClick for Publishersand DFP Small Business, combines Google‘s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick‘s display advertising and ad serving experience.
March
We acquire Picnik, a site enabling you to edit your photos in the cloud, without leaving your browser.
Stars in search is a new feature that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content.
The Google Apps Marketplace is a new online store for integrated business applications that allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.
Bike directions and bike trail data come to Google Maps.
Following the January announcement about search in China, we stop censoring our search services–Google Search, Google News and Google Images–on Google.cn, instead redirecting users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.
April
For April Fool‘s Day, we change our name to Topeka. The change is a tribute to Topeka, Kansas, which changed its name to Google as part of an effort to bring our experimental fiber network to that city.
Scientists announce a significant new hominid fossil discovery, made with help from Google Earth, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa.
New features for real-time search include the ability to search the archive of public tweets and “replay” the conversation from a particular moment in time, as well as a tool called Google Follow Finder that helps you find new people to follow.
Google Places (formerly the Local Business Center) gets a new name along with some new features, like showing service areas and, in some cities, the ability to use an easy advertising program called Tags.
We launch a Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world.
With Earth view in Google Maps, you can explore Google Earth’s detailed 3D imagery and terrain directly in Google Maps, on your browser.
Oregon becomes the first state to open up Google Apps for Education to public schools throughout the state.
May
As part of our efforts to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, we make our first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project.
In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we provide Google Earth imagery of the spill’s spread.
We roll out a refreshed look for our search results, with a new, contextual left-hand panel that highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query.
A team of Googlers in London create a photomosaic of the Google logo. (Later, this project becomes the inspiration for a company contest.)
At Google I/O, we announce Google TV, which is built on Android and Chrome and gives you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. We’re busy at I/O this year, with a handful of other announcements and updates.
In celebration of PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, we release our first-ever playable doodle, complete with all 256 levels and Ms. PAC-MAN. It’s so popular we soon give it a permanent home.
You have the option to search more securely with SSL-encrypted Google web search.
We release a report on our economic impact in the United States: in 2009, we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits.
The 2010 Doodle 4 Google winner in the U.S. is third grader Mackenzie Melton, for her doodle “Rainforest Habitat.”
We officially acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company.
June
You can now personalize your Google.com with a background image.
With help from the Marin Bee Company, we install the Hiveplex–four bee hives painted in Google’s colors, situated in a flowered area on our campus. We have our first honey harvestlater in the year.
We collaborate with the Guggenheim Museum on a global online initiative, called YouTube Play: A Biennal of Creative Video, to discover the most creative video in the world.
We catch football fever, offering ways for fans to stay on top of the 2010 World Cup as well as a lot of thorough analysis of soccer search trends.
Caffeine, our new indexing system, provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and is the largest collection of web content we‘ve offered.
Google Voice is now available to anyone in the U.S.
We stop redirecting Chinese users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk. Instead, we provide a landing page where users can use Google.cn services that we can provide without filtering, and/or click through to Google.com.hk for search.
The Google News homepage is redesigned to make your view of news more relevant and easier for you to share interesting stories.
July
We sign an agreement to acquire ITA, a software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times, availability and prices.
“Life in a Day” is a cinematic experiment to document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world.
We acquire Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world.
We announce an agreement to purchase the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy Resources Story County II facility in Iowa.
Google Images gets a new look, designed to make it easier for you to take advantage of some of the powerful technology behind Images.
Google Apps for Government, our newest edition of Google Apps, includes the same Google applications offered to businesses and everyday users, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.
August
We will not continue to develop Google Wave as a standalone product.
We acquire Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.
With Verizon, we announce a joint policy proposal for an open Internet.
Voice Actions for Android are a series of voice commands that let you control your phone just by speaking.
If you’re in the U.S., you can now call any phone directly from Gmail.
Realtime Search gets a new standalone homepage, along with more tools for exploring and refining real-time results.
“The Wilderness Downtown” is a musical experience created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google, built with Google Chrome in mind using HTML5 and other technologies.
Priority Inbox, an experimental way of handling information overload in Gmail, automatically sorts your email by importance, using a variety of signals.
September
We celebrate Google Chrome’s second birthday with a new release of the browser that’s three times faster than the original beta.
Google Instant predicts what you’re interested in and shows you search results as you type so you can quickly get to the information you’re looking for.
Our new Family Safety Center is a one-stop shop with info for parents and teachers on how to keep kids safe online.
A new online Transparency Report gives people tools to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked.
Google News turns eight.
We announce the five winners of Project 10^100.
We celebrate the 50th anniversary of “The Flintstones” with a Google doodle.
Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica imagery comes to Street View. Now, three years after we first launched Street View in five U.S. cities, you can explore all seven continents at eye level!
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