Google Search
Search engine from Google
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| April 2025 | Trial scheduled to determine remedies sought by the Department of Justice to address Google's illegal monopoly, potentially including breaking up the company or preventing it from using data to secure AI sector dominance. |
| March 2025 | Google introduced an experimental 'AI Mode' within its Search platform, leveraging the Gemini 2.0 model. The feature enables complex, multi-part query processing with comprehensive AI-generated responses, initially available to Google One AI Premium subscribers in the United States through Search Labs. |
| March 13 2025 |
Google Search
Google initiated the March 2025 Core Update, estimated to take up to two weeks to complete.
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| 2024 | Tenor began experiencing widespread spam with millions of crypto advertisement GIFs from a creator named 'Blazzord', causing usability issues across partner social media platforms. |
| December 12 2024 |
Google Search
Google released the December 2024 Core Update, which was completed within 6 days.
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| November 11 2024 |
Google Search
Google implemented the November 2024 Core Update, which was rolled out over 23 days.
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| October 28 2024 | AI Overviews was rolled out to 100 additional countries, including Australia and New Zealand. |
| September 10 2024 | The European Court of Justice ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in shopping search, finding the company's practices discriminatory. The court mandated Google to pay a €2.4 billion fine and deemed the practices in violation of the Digital Markets Act. |
| August 2024 | AI Overviews expanded to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, with local language support. |
| August 15 2024 |
Google Search
Google rolled out the August 2024 Core Update, which extended over a period of 19 days.
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| August 5 2024 | Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly over Internet search, finding the company in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Google announced its intention to appeal the ruling and proposed loosening search deals with Apple and other partners that previously required Google as the default search engine. |
| May 2024 | AI Overviews was rolled out to users in the United States, replacing the previous Search Generative Experience. |
| March 5 2024 |
Google Search
Google releases March 2024 Core Update, combining Helpful Content Updates and implementing measures against scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse.
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| 2023 | Technology reporters claimed Google Search was 'bloated and overmonetized', based on internal documents from the United States v. Google LLC antitrust case, suggesting that semantic matching of search queries prioritized advertising profits over search quality. |
| 2023 |
Google News
Google announced it would block Canadian news sites from visitors in Canada in response to the Online News Act.
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| 2023 | A study by University of California, Berkeley and Northeastern University scholars finds that Google Books' digitization has led to increased sales of physical book versions. |
| November 2023 | During the ongoing antitrust trial, an economics professor from the University of Chicago disclosed that Google pays Apple 36% of all search advertising revenue generated through Safari browser searches, causing a visible reaction of discomfort from Google's lead attorney. |
| October 2023 | Google added image generation capabilities to the Search Generative Experience feature. |
| October 18 2023 |
Google News
Confirmed cutting at least 40 jobs in the news division, while stating that these internal changes would not impact their misinformation and information quality work.
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| May 2023 | Google unveiled Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experimental AI feature at Google I/O, responding to the rise of generative AI technology like ChatGPT. |
| 2022 |
Google News
Spanish version of Google News reopened after Spain transposed the 2019 European Union copyright rule.
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| August 25 2022 |
Google Search
Google rolls out Helpful Content Update targeting content created primarily for search engine ranking rather than user helpfulness.
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| 2021 |
Google Shopping
The General Court upheld the €2.4 billion antitrust fine against Google, with an appeal still pending.
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| June 3 2021 |
Google Knowledge Graph
A Knowledge Graph box controversially identified Kannada as the 'ugliest language in India', causing significant public outrage from the Kannada-language community and a threat of legal action from the state of Karnataka.
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| 2020 | Antitrust lawsuit against Google's search business was initiated in the D.C. Circuit Court, challenging the company's search market practices. |
| 2020 |
Google Knowledge Graph
Dariusz Jemielniak published a book highlighting that most Google users are unaware that Knowledge Graph answers originate from Wikipedia, potentially reducing Wikipedia's popularity and ability to attract volunteers and fundraising.
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| 2020 |
Google Trends
Research published demonstrating Google Trends' ability to forecast employment growth in the United States at national and state levels with high accuracy, even predicting up to a year in advance.
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| 2020 |
Google Trends
Research highlighting the variability and potential unreliability of Google Trends data gained major media attention in Germany, cautioning about the risks of using the platform for predictive analysis.
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| October 2020 |
Google News
Google announced 'Showcases' program, paying publishers to curate featured news content in Google News and Discover, initially launching in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
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| May 2020 |
Google Knowledge Graph
Google expands the Knowledge Graph to 500 billion facts covering 5 billion entities, demonstrating significant growth in its information repository.
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| 2019 | The New York Times published an investigative article revealing the presence of child sexual abuse images on Google Search, highlighting the company's reportedly inconsistent approach to removing such content. |
| 2019 |
PageRank
Google introduced new HTML attribute tags 'rel="ugc"' for user-generated content and 'rel="sponsored"' for sponsored content, which do not pass PageRank and prevent SEO link manipulation.
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| 2019 |
Google Trends
Tom Cochran from 720 Strategies conducted a study comparing Google Trends to political polling, examining the relationship between search volume and candidate popularity during the Democratic primary.
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| December 9 2019 |
Google Search
Google extends BERT natural language processing update internationally, implementing the algorithm across 70 languages.
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| May 2019 |
Google Shopping
Google announced a revamped Google Shopping experience at its Marketing Live event, integrating the existing Google Express marketplace into a new shopping platform.
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| September 2018 | A significant update renamed the app from Google Feed to Google Discover, featuring an updated design and additional features. The update also solidified the platform's approach to personalized content recommendations. |
| August 2018 | Danny Sullivan announced a broad core algorithm update, later named 'Medic', which targeted medical and health-related websites with low-quality content and misinformation. |
| May 2018 |
Google News
Google launched a revamped version of Google News featuring artificial intelligence capabilities to improve content relevance and user information discovery.
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| April 30 2018 | Google announced the discontinuation of the dedicated encrypted.google.com search page, citing widespread adoption of HTTPS connections in modern browsers and across Google products. |
| March 2018 |
Google Shopping
Google introduced Shopping Actions, a commission-based model allowing customers to shop across Google Assistant, Search, mobile, desktop, and Google Home devices using a universal cart.
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| March 27 2018 | Tenor was acquired by Google, with the company continuing to operate as a standalone brand. |
| December 2017 | Google began rolling out the mobile-first indexing strategy, implementing changes for multiple websites. |
| October 2017 |
Google News
Replaced the 'first click free' program with a 'flexible sampling' model, allowing publishers to choose the number of free articles.
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| July 2017 | Google Discover received a major update, enhancing its functionality and user experience. |
| June 2017 |
Google News
Conducted a thorough redesign of the desktop version of Google News, focusing on making news more accessible with a card format for grouping related stories.
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| June 27 2017 |
Google Shopping
The European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, fined Google €2.4 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules by abusing its market dominance in search engine results.
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| 2016 |
Google Panda
Matt Cutts, former head of webspam, commented that the Panda update was significant enough to be disclosed as a material impact on Google's earnings, despite potential revenue challenges.
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| December 2016 | Google launched Google Discover (initially called Google Feed), a personalized content stream that provides articles, videos, and news-related content based on users' interests and interactions with Google. |
| October 2016 | Gary Illyes announced Google would create a separate, primary web index for mobile devices, with a secondary index for desktop use. |
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This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Google Shopping, Tenor (website), Timeline of Google Search, Google Search, Google Panda, Google Books, Google Trends, Google Knowledge Graph, PageRank & Google News, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.