Google in 2010 was a white page with a colourful logo, one box and ten blue links. The year began with Google refusing to keep censoring results in China, added a left-hand panel of search tools in May, and ended with Google Instant showing results before you finished typing.
Results pages showed blue titles, green URLs and two lines of black snippet text, with sponsored links in a pale yellow box at the top. The homepage gained a "fade-in" effect in late 2009 that hid everything but the box until you moved the mouse. In May 2010 a redesign added the left sidebar (Everything, Images, Videos, News and more) and lightened the logo's shadow; in June the Caffeine index made results fresher; and on 8 September Google Instant began showing results as you typed.
On 21 May the homepage logo became a playable Pac-Man doodle for the game's 30th anniversary, the first interactive doodle. Google Zeitgeist named Chatroulette, iPad and Justin Bieber the fastest-rising searches of the year.
- Domain in 2010
- google.com
- Launched
- 4 September 1998
- Founders
- Larry Page, Sergey Brin
- Owner in 2010
- Google Inc. (public)
- Status today
- Still active
What people used it for
- Web search, images, news and maps
- Gmail, Docs, Reader and Calendar
- iGoogle personalised homepages
Interface characteristics
- White homepage with a single box and two buttons
- Ten blue links per page with green URLs
- Left sidebar of search tools (from May 2010)
- Sponsored links in a yellow box
- Google Suggest dropdown
Notable features
- Google Instant (September 2010)
- Caffeine index (June 2010)
- Pac-Man doodle (May 2010)
- Stopped censoring google.cn (March 2010)
- Google Buzz and Google Wave (both failed in 2010)
What happened later
Google reorganised under Alphabet in 2015 and added AI-generated answers to search results in 2024.
Archived on the Wayback Machine
Archived pages open on web.archive.org (Internet Archive). They are historical captures, not part of this exhibit.
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