Google Images launched as a dedicated image-search service in 2001.
Google created the service after users searched for photographs of Jennifer Lopez wearing a distinctive green Versace dress at the 2000 Grammy Awards. Ordinary web-search results could point to pages about the dress, but users wanted to see the image itself.
The launch gave Google a separate interface for finding pictures across the web. It helped establish image search as a major search category rather than treating images as an occasional part of ordinary web results.
Google Images is sometimes confused with Google Lens, which uses visual recognition and image-based queries. Google Images primarily searches an indexed collection of online images, while Lens analyzes an image to identify objects, text, places, or similar products. The original service therefore belongs to the early-2000s expansion of Google Search into specialized search tools.