The Dress that Changed Google Forever

Arjit Raj
2 min readAug 2, 2023

Did you know Jennifer Lopez’s green dress look, led to the creation of Google images? Here is the whole story —

In the year 2000, during the Grammy Awards, Jennifer Lopez wore a striking green dress by designer Donatella Versace. The gown received significant media attention and became one of the most talked-about fashion moments of that year. It also became the most popular search query on Google: “Jennifer Lopez’s green dress”.

But, in 2000, Google Search results were limited to simple pages of text with links. Realizing that an image search was required to answer this query, the green dress incident served as a catalyst leading to the introduction of Google Images in July 2001.

Today, Google search stats show that 10.1% of Google traffic is for images.google.com. People are searching for some images and click on them around 1 billion times a day. That equals around 11.5k every second. This vital part of Google search so far has indexed around 10 billion images.

This is another great example of how being very attentive to what users are doing and what problems they are facing can lead to some great insights and great products.

From your own startup, which of the customer actions led to a unique insight?

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