From “Google!”
to “AI Mode”

Google’s December 1998 page has a huge logo with tall shaded letters, and the second button says I'm feeling lucky in lower case. The middle teal box lists Help!, About Google!, Company Info and Google! Logos. The right one asks for your e-mail: Get Google! updates monthly.

At the bottom: Copyright ©1998 Google Inc. The company was three months old. It was incorporated on September 4, 1998.^[1]

Google’s first doodle is older than the company. On August 30, 1998 the founders were away at the Burning Man festival, and they needed a way to tell users nobody was around. Their out-of-office note went into the logo: the second O was replaced with the Burning Man logo.^[2] Five days later Google Inc. was incorporated.

By January 1999 the middle box has grown. It now also offers Why use Google!, Press about Google!, Jobs at Google and Making Google! the Default. The exclamation mark is everywhere, even in the browser tab.

On February 29, 2000 the exclamation mark and BETA are gone. The new logo has bevelled letters, a drop shadow and a tiny SM. The page above and below it is almost bare: Search the web using Google, the box, the two buttons and, under them, one promotional link, Add Free WebSearch To Your Site.

The second button has capitals now: I'm Feeling Lucky. It keeps them on every capture after this one. At the top right a blue ball sits next to the words About Google, drawn as a picture; the HTML names it only in its alt text. The footer has four links, and the last one is We're Hiring!

A month after this capture, on April 1, Google’s April Fools page MentalPlex asked visitors to project a mental image of their query and picture clicking a circle.^[4] On June 26, 2000 Yahoo announced Google as its default search-results provider.^[5]

Google’s homepage in January 2001 has a number right above the box: Search 1,326,920,000 web pages. Below the buttons a green link, Google Web Directory, promises the web organized by topic. The footer starts with Cool Jobs.

On Google’s January 2002 homepage the number has moved down to the footer, Searching 2,073,418,204 web pages, and four tabs sit on top of the box: Web, Images, Groups and Directory. Web is a solid blue tab. The others are grey. The counter grows on every capture until 2005.

Google’s February 2003 homepage was saved at www2.google.com, and it has a fifth tab: News. The logo still carries a small TM. Under the buttons a red New! opens a one-line invitation: Take your search further. Take a Google Tour.

The footer is a row of four links, Advertise with Us, Search Solutions, Services & Tools and Jobs, Press, & Help, then the counter at 3,083,324,652 pages.

January 5, 2004 looks almost the same. The Google Tour line is gone. Search Solutions has become Business Solutions. The counter reads 3,307,998,701, a smaller jump than the year before, and the line in front of it still says ©2003 Google five days into the new year.

Google’s homepage on January 1, 2005 has a doodle: a pale 2005 drawn behind the Google wordmark. Its alt text says Happy New Year! The one line under the buttons is not festive at all. It reads Ways to help with tsunami relief.

The tabs have turned into plain links. Web is bold text, followed by Images, Groups with a small red New!, News, Froogle and more ». The footer is down to two links, Advertising Programs and About Google.

And the counter makes its last appearance in our captures, more than twice the number of a year earlier: Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages. Next to it the copyright still says 2004. The page was captured at 9:11 in the morning, UTC, on New Year’s Day.

In June 2006 the counter is gone, and two links have appeared in the top right corner: Personalized Home and Sign in. Google launched a personalized homepage in May 2005^[6] and, that September, announced a link to it on the classic homepage.^[7] Above the box: Web, Images, Groups, News, Froogle, Maps and more ».

June 2007 moves those links into a thin bar across the top of the window: Web, Images, Video, News, Maps, Gmail and more ▼. At the right end it says iGoogle | Sign in, where Personalized Home used to be. The more ▼ menu is closed in the still. Its code lists 14 more services:

The April 2008 bar reads Web, Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Gmail and more ▼. Shopping is new, and so is YouTube, inside the closed menu’s code. Below the logo there is the box with Advanced Search, Preferences and Language Tools beside it, the buttons, three footer links and ©2008 Google.

June 2009 adds Video back to the bar and a Privacy link to the copyright line. Otherwise the page could pass for the year before. Its menu code lists Sites as a new service.

The next change was about when you saw all this. In December 2009 Google made the homepage show only the logo, the search box and the buttons at first. The other links appeared when the visitor moved the mouse.^[8] In our 2010 and 2011 stills the links are all in place.

On May 22, 2010, 25 minutes after midnight UTC, the logo is a maze. The letters of Google are drawn as walls on a black field, with dots, ghosts and PAC-MAN inside. The alt text reads PAC-MAN's 30th Birthday! Doodle with PAC-MAN™ & ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. In a capture from 00:17 UTC on May 21 the logo’s image label still says just Google.

Google called it its first playable doodle, planned to stay on the homepage for 48 hours.^[9] It also hid a second player. Insert another coin and Ms. PAC-MAN joins, steered with the W, A, S and D keys.^[9]

Less than three weeks after PAC-MAN, Google put pictures behind its homepage logo. It had just added a feature that let people put a photo of their own there. On June 9, 2010 it announced a gallery of photos and artworks by well-known artists, sculptors and photographers, to run as the homepage background for the next 24 hours.^[11]

The show was meant to come with a link on the homepage explaining it. Because of a bug, most users never saw that link.^[11] So a photo behind the same logo, box and buttons was enough to make people think the page had changed for good. None of the captures we picked shows that day. Our 2010 still is the PAC-MAN maze, and by our April 2011 capture the page is white again.

Google’s April 2011 capture is the first in this set to show the refreshed logo: lighter letters, a softer shadow and no TM mark. Google had announced it on May 5, 2010,^[10] but our 2010 capture shows the PAC-MAN doodle in its place.

The footer links are the same as on the PAC-MAN day. At the top right, iGoogle | Search settings | Sign in has become Sign in and a gear. The small print changes too. Advanced Search and Language Tools beside the box are now Advanced search and Language tools, lower case.

The code of the closed menu has a new entry, Realtime, between Blogs and YouTube.

In 2011 a doodle for the Polish writer Stanisław Lem became the first whose code Google released as open source.^[12]

On January 18, 2012 a black bar lies across the logo. Under the buttons one line: Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web! The image behind the bar has the same words as its alt text. Google said it was censoring its own logo and asking visitors to petition Congress against two bills, SOPA and PIPA.^[13] Search itself stayed on.

The rest of the page has small changes of its own. The first word of the top bar is now Search instead of Web, and the footer has a new link, +Google. In the code of the Account Options menu, iGoogle is still there. In July 2012 Google announced it would retire iGoogle on November 1, 2013, giving users 16 months to move or export their data.^[14] Our April 2013 capture no longer lists it.

In April 2013 a black bar runs along the top of the window: Search in white with a red line above it, then Images, Maps, Play, YouTube, News, Gmail, Drive and More. Sign in and a gear sit at the right. The logo still has its bevel. The footer ends with Privacy & Terms.

In September 2013 Google announced an app launcher for the top right corner and small changes to the logo’s colors and letter shapes, rolling out over the following weeks.^[15]

Our September 2014 capture has the flat logo. The black bar is still there, though, and the footer still says © 2013. Its code also holds a box we left out of the still:

By April 2015 the black bar is gone. The top right corner has +You, Gmail, Images, a square of nine dots and a blue Sign in button. A microphone sits at the end of the search box. The footer is a grey strip at the very bottom of the window, with Advertising, Business and About on the left and Privacy, Terms and Settings on the right.

The code adds two lines the still doesn’t show: Say "Ok Google" to start a voice search. and Screen reader users, click here to turn off Google Instant.

This is the last capture with the serif logo. On September 1, 2015 Google introduced a new logo and identity for many devices and ways of searching. The small icon changed too: the blue lowercase g gave way to a four-color capital G.^[16]

Google’s April 2016 homepage has the new logo, round letters without serifs. +You has left the top right corner, and the buttons are flat grey rectangles with small grey text. The microphone is gone too. It is missing from our 2016, 2017 and 2018 captures.

The plain letters were also about weight. Google built a special version of the full-color logo that is only 305 bytes. The old logo was about 14,000 bytes, and its serifs made it so heavy that on low-bandwidth connections Google served a text imitation of it instead.^[17]

Google’s March 2017 homepage keeps the 2016 layout, but its box now has a soft shadow. Its code carries a hidden offer: Get to Google faster. Switch your default search engine to Google.

April 2018 keeps that shadow. Its code also holds a warning bar that we left out of the still:

March 2019 rounds the corners of the box and brings the microphone back. Two links appear at the top left, About and Store, and About leaves the footer.

On April 14, 2020 the letters of the logo carry a shopping basket and stand next to crates of produce. The line under the buttons repeats the doodle’s alt text: To all grocery workers, thank you. The footer gains a new link on the left, How Search works.

A year later the line under the buttons points somewhere else: Discover Black innovators and their contributions in electronic music. And the middle of the footer, empty since 2015, now has a small green leaf and Carbon neutral since 2007. It stays there on our 2022 and 2023 captures.

From 2022 to 2025 our captures come from www.google.com/webhp?hl=en, Google’s English homepage. The June 2022 page has a rounded box, a microphone and the green leaf. Its code adds a setting, Dark theme: Off.

June 2023 puts a camera icon next to the microphone. The June 2024 page keeps both icons, adds a square of nine dots beside Sign in and drops the leaf from the footer. Its code labels a regional version: Google offered in: Deutsch, with Germany in the footer. We hid that line.

In November 2025 a new button sits inside the box, next to the microphone and the camera: AI Mode. That July Google had told desktop users to look for the new AI Mode button on the Google homepage.^[18] Its code names the Netherlands in the footer, and About is back there too.

May 2026 adds a + at the left end of the box. The menu behind it is closed in the still. Its code lists Upload image, Upload file, Create images with a banana emoji, and Canvas. The green leaf is back in the footer, with new words: Applying AI towards science and the environment.

1998 · Google!2026 · AI Mode

◀ ▶

In 1998 the page gave you two buttons, Google Search and I'm feeling lucky. The teal boxes, the counter, the tabs, the black bar and the serifs have all gone since. The two buttons are still under the box in May 2026, with a capital F and a capital L. AI Mode got a button too, but not a place next to them. It sits inside the box.