Grammy Awards: How Jennifer Lopez's Grammys 2000 dress invented Google Image Search

It was back in 2000 when Jennifer Lopez stepped out on the Grammy red carpet in her jungle print Versace dress. This is how Google Images actually came into existence and here's proof of it. In 2000, Google search results were just limited to simple pages with text but ever since people began searching for the On the Floor Singer's green dress that year, Google was forced to introduce this feature for all.

After Lopez was nominated for Best Dance Recording for Waiting for Tonight, she showed up on the red carpet of the Grammys in a jungle-green Versace dress that had a plunging neckline reaching all the way to her belly.

Jennifer Lopez's Grammys 2000 dress invented Google Image Search

As per the New York Times, after Jennifer made a glamorous appearance on stage, her fans worldwide just wanted to have every glimpse of her dress and the actor's red carpet look. As former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt wrote on Project Syndicate in 2015, "People wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the Grammy Awards 2000, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention." He continued, "At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: J­Lo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born."

'It was not overnight but Lopez was definitely the impetus': Cathy Edwards

According to Cathy Edwards, the director of engineering and product for Google Images, "It was not overnight but Lopez was definitely the impetus which is a truth." She further added, "it is also not the case that this happened and the next day we said, Oh, we should build an image search engine!" adding, "everyone there at the time was like, Of course, we need to build an image search engine, but they weren’t sure how much priority to give it."

She stated that when Lopez's Grammys dress garnered massive attention, Cathy said that it became crystal clear that this was important." Later, as per GQ, Cathy stated that the dress became an evergreen search for Google. She said, "People are still doing queries for ‘Jennifer Lopez green dress,’ ‘Jennifer Lopez jungle print dress,’ ‘Jennifer Lopez Grammys dress,’ [that] sort of thing."

20 years later, Cathy noted, "I think they knew that information was extraordinarily powerful, and that democratizing information in this way, organizing it and making it useful, making it accessible, was going to be powerful. But I think it’s hard to predict the level of impact that search and the Internet and Google has had on the world. I think everyone’s a bit surprised by that."

Image: Twitter/@loversinfilm