How do you break the internet so hard that a tech giant has to invent a brand new feature just to handle it? You wear this exact dress. In February 2000, Jennifer Lopez showed up to the Grammy Awards wearing a plunging, sheer green Versace dress. The next morning, it instantly became the single most popular search query Google had ever seen. But there was a massive problem. At the time, Google only provided a list of blue text links. Users didn't want to read an article describing the outfit; they just wanted to see the picture. Google's engineering team realized their text-only search engine was completely failing to give the world what it wanted. The demand was so overwhelming that they had no choice but to build an entirely new visual search tool from scratch. And that is how one red carpet outfit single-handedly birthed Google Images.

How do you break the internet so hard that a tech giant has to invent a brand new feature just to handle it? You wear this exact dress. In February 2000, Jennifer Lopez showed up to the Grammy Awards wearing a plunging, sheer green Versace dress. The next morning, it instantly became the single most popular search query Google had ever seen. But there was a massive problem. At the time, Google only provided a list of blue text links. Users didn't want to read an article describing the outfit; they just wanted to see the picture. Google's engineering team realized their text-only search engine was completely failing to give the world what it wanted. The demand was so overwhelming that they had no choice but to build an entirely new visual search tool from scratch. And that is how one red carpet outfit single-handedly birthed Google Images.