2006
January
Our first Code Jam in China concludes in Beijing. The winner, graduate student Chuan Xu, is one of more than 13,000 registrants.
We announce the acquisition of dMarc, a digital radio advertising company.
Google.cn, a local domain version of Google, goes live in China.
We introduce Picasa in 25 more languages, including Polish, Thai and Vietnamese.
February
We release Chat in Gmail, using the instant messaging tools from Google Talk.
Eric Schmidt is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Larry Brilliant becomes the executive director of Google.org, our philanthropic arm.
Google News for mobile launches.
March
We announce the acquisition of Writely, a web-based word processing application that subsequently becomes the basis for Google Docs.
A team working from Mountain View, Bangalore and New York collaborates to create Google Finance, our approach to an improved search experience for financial information.
April
For April Fool's we unveil a new product, Google Romance: "Dating is a search problem."
We launch Google Calendar, complete with sharing and group features.
We release Maps for France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
May
We release Google Trends, a way to visualize the popularity of searches over time.
June
We announce Picasa Web Albums, allowing Picasa users to upload and share their photos online
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) adds "Google" as a verb.
Gmail, Google News and iGoogle become available on mobile phones in eight more languages besides English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.
Gmail launches in Arabic and Hebrew, bringing the number of interfaces up to 40.
July
At Google Code Jam Europe, nearly 10,000 programmers from 31 countries compete at Google Dublin for the top prizes; Tomasz Czajka from Poland wins the final round.
August
We launch free citywide WiFi in Mountain View.
More than 100 libraries on 10 campuses of the University of California join the Google Books Library Project.
Star Trek's 40th Anniversary Convention in Las Vegas features a Google booth showcasing tools appropriate for intergalactic use.
Apps for Your Domain, a suite of applications designed for organizations of all sizes, and including including Gmail and Calendar, is released.
Google Book Search begins offering free PDF downloads of books in the public domain.
September
We add an archive search to Google News, with more than 200 years of historical articles.
Featured Content for Google Earth includes overlays from the UN Environmental Program, Discovery Networks, the Jane Goodall Institute, and the National Park Service.
The University Complutense of Madrid becomes the first Spanish-language library to join the Google Books Library Project.
October
Together with LitCam and UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning, we launch the Literacy Project, offering resources for teachers, literacy groups and anyone interested in reading promotion.
We announce our acquisition of YouTube.
We release web-based applications Docs & Spreadsheets: Word processor Docs is a reworking of Writely (acquired in March).
We acquire JotSpot, a collaborative wiki platform, which later becomes Google Sites.
November
The first nationwide Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.K. takes place with the theme My Britain. More than 15,000 kids in Britain enter, and 13-year old Katherine Chisnall is chosen to have her doodle displayed on www.google.co.uk. There have been Doodle 4 Google contests in several other years and countries since.
December
We release Patent Search in the U.S., indexing more than 7 million patents dating back to 1790.
2007
January
We announce a partnership with China Mobile, the world's largest mobile telecom carrier, to provide mobile and Internet search services in China.
February
We release Google Maps in Australia, complete with local business results and mobile capability.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets is available in eleven more languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian.
For Valentine's Day, we open up Gmail to everyone. (Previously, it was available by invitation only).
Google Apps Premier Edition launches, bringing cloud computing to businesses.
The Candidates@Google series kicks off with Senator Hillary Clinton, the first of several 2008 Presidential candidates, including Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, to visit the Googleplex.
We introduce traffic information to Google Maps for more than 30 cities around the US.
March
Our first Latin American software coding contest ends with Fábio Dias Moreira of Brazil taking the grand prize. He scored more points than 5,000 other programmers from all over the continent.
We sign partnerships to give free access to Google Apps for Education to 70,000 university students in Kenya and Rwanda.
April
This April Fool's Day is extra busy: not only do we introduce the Gmail Paper Archive and TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) -- we lose (and find) a real snake in our New York office!
We add eight more languages to Blogger, bringing the total to 19.
May
In partnership with the Growing Connection, we plant a vegetable garden in the middle of the Googleplex, the output of which is incorporated into our café offerings.
We move into permanent space in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Governor Jennifer Granholm helps us celebrate. The office is an AdWords support site.
At our Searchology event, we announce new strides taken towards universal search. Now video, news, books, image and local results are all integrated together in one search result.
Google Hot Trends launches, listing the current 100 most active queries, showing what people are searching for at the moment.
Street View debuts in Google Maps in five U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver.
On Developer Day, we announce Google Gears (now known just as Gears), an open source technology for creating offline web applications.
June
Google Maps gets prime placement on the original Apple iPhone.
YouTube becomes available in nine more domains: Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland and the U.K.
We announce a partnership with Salesforce.com, combining that company's on-demand CRM applications with AdWords.
We unveil several "green" initiatives: RechargeIT, aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the completion of our installation of solar panels at the Googleplex, in Mountain View, and our intention to be completely carbon-neutral by the end of 2007. We also announce the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, in collaboration with Intel, Dell, and more than 30 other companies.
Google Earth Outreach is introduced, designed to help nonprofit organizations use Google Earth to advocate their causes.
July
We announce the acquisition of Postini.
The first CNN/YouTube debate takes place between the eight U.S. Democratic Presidential candidates. (The Republicans get their turn in November 2007.)
Google Finance becomes available for non-U.S. markets for the first time, in Canada.
Google Apps is now available in 28 languages.
August
We ask users for their interpretation of how Gmail travels around the world, and get more than 1,100 video responses from more than 65 different countries.
To infinity and beyond! Sky launches inside Google Earth, including layers for constellation information and virtual tours of galaxies.
September
AdSense for Mobile is introduced, giving sites optimized for mobile browsers the ability to host the same ads as standard websites.
Together with the X PRIZE Foundation we announce the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon for a $30 million prize purse.
We add Presently, a new application for making slide presentations, to Google Docs.
Google Reader becomes available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (U.K.), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese and Korean.
October
We partner with IBM on a supercomputing initiative so that students can learn to work at Internet scale on computing challenges.
November
We announce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks.
Android, the first open platform for mobile devices, and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. Soon after, we introduce the $10 million Android Developer Challenge.
Google.org announces RE
December
The Queen of England launches The Royal Channel on YouTube. She is the first monarch to establish a video presence this way.
2008
January
Google.org announces five key initiatives: in addition to the previously-announced RE
February
For people searching in Hebrew, Arabic, or other right-to-left languages, we introduce a feature aimed at making searches easier by detecting the direction of a query.
Google Sites, a revamp of the acquisition JotSpot, debuts. Sites enables users to create collaborative websites with embedded videos, documents, and calendars.
March
We finally complete the acquisition deal for DoubleClick.
Together with Yahoo and MySpace, we announce the OpenSocial Foundation, an independent non-profit group designed to provide transparency and operational guidelines around the open software tools for social computing.
April
We feature 16 April Fool's jokes from our offices around the world, including the new airline announced with Sir Richard Branson (Virgle), AdSense for Conversations, a Manpower Search (China), and the Google Wake-Up Kit. Bonus foolishness: all viewers linking to YouTube-featured videos are "Rickrolled."
A new version of Google Earth launches, incorporating Street View and 12 more languages. At the same time, KML 2.2, which began as the Google Earth file format, is accepted as an official Open Geospacial Consortium standard.
Google Website Optimizer comes out of beta, expanding from an AdWords-only product. It's a free website-testing tool with which users can continually test different combinations of their website content (such as images and text), to see which ones yield the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
We launch Google Finance China allowing Chinese investors to get stock and mutual fund data as a result of this collaboration between our New York and Shanghai teams.
We introduce a collection of 70+ new themes ("skins") for iGoogle, contributed by such artists and designers as Dale Chihuly, Oscar de la Renta, Kwon Ki-Soo and Philippe Starck.
May
Following both the Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma), Google Earth adds new satellite information for the region(s) to help recovery efforts.
Reflecting our commitment to searchers worldwide, Google search now supports Unicode 5.1.
At a developer event, we preview Google FriendConnect, a set of functions and applications enabling website owners to easily make their sites social by adding registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, plus applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
With IPv4 addresses (the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet) running low, Google search becomes available over IPv6, a new IP address space large enough to assign almost three billion networks to every person on the planet. Vint Cerf is a key proponent of broad and immediate adoption of IPv6.
Google Translate adds 10 more languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish), bringing the total to 23.
We introduce a series of blog posts detailing the many aspects of good search results on the Official Google Blog.
California 6th grader Grace Moon wins the U.S. 2008 Doodle 4 Google competition for her doodle "Up In The Clouds."
June
Real-time stock quotes go live on Google Finance for the first time.
A new version of Maps for Mobile debuts, putting Google Transit directions on phones in more than 50 cities worldwide.
For the first time, Google engineers create the problems for contestants to solve at the 7th Annual Code Jam competition.
July
We provide Street View for the entire 2008 Tour de France route -- the first launch of Street View imagery in Europe.
Our first downloadable iPhone app, featuring My Location and word suggestions for quicker mobile searching, debuts with the launch of the Apple 3G iPhone.
We work with the band Radiohead to make a music video of their song "House of Cards," using only data, and not cameras.
Our indexing system for processing links indicates that we now count 1 trillion unique URLs (and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day).
August
Street View is available in several cities in Japan and Australia - the first time it's appeared outside of North America or Europe.
Google Suggest feature arrives on Google.com, helping formulate queries, reduce spelling errors, and reduce keystrokes.
Just in time for the U.S. political conventions, we launch a site dedicated to the 2008 U.S. elections, with news, video and photos as well as tools for teachers and campaigners.
September
Word gets out about Chrome a bit ahead of schedule when the comic book that introduces our new open source browser is released earlier than planned on September 1. The browser officially becomes available for worldwide download a day later.
We get involved with the U.S. political process at the presidential nominating conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties.
We release an upgrade for Picasa, including new editing tools, a movie maker, and easier syncing with the web. At the same time, Picasa Web Albums is updated with a new feature allowing users to "name tag" people in photos.
Google News Archive helps to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.
Thanks to all of our users, Google celebrates 10 fast-paced years.
And on and on....
What's next from Google? It's hard to say. We don't talk much about what lies ahead, because we believe one of our chief competitive advantages is surprise. You can always take a peek at some of the ideas our engineers are currently kicking around by visiting them at Google Labs. Have fun, but be sure to wear your safety goggles.