On what date did Google Images launch?

Google Images launched on July 12, 2001.

The service emerged after Google noticed enormous demand for pictures of Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace dress, worn at the Grammy Awards in February 2000. Ordinary Google results were mostly text links, so they could not easily satisfy people searching specifically for the famous image. That demand helped motivate Google to build a dedicated image-search system.

Google paired engineer Huican Zhu with product manager Susan Wojcicki to develop the feature. When Image Search launched in 2001, it indexed about 250 million images. Its image collection expanded to roughly 1 billion images by 2005 and more than 10 billion by 2010.

The service was initially called Google Image Search and is now commonly called Google Images. It displays thumbnails that lead users to larger images and the webpages hosting them. A frequent mistake is to confuse the launch date with later additions such as reverse image search, which arrived years afterward. July 12, 2001 refers to the original public launch of the image-search service.