The power of J-Lo’s flawless-ness
Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, published an essay to Project Syndicate earlier this year titled The Tinkerer’s Apprentice, about the beauty of making small tweaks to big projects, which often helps them go from good to great, or game-changing. One of those tweaks was adding Google Images, the picture-specific branch of the multi-billion dollar search engine company, to the Google.com domain. Though it seems like an obvious tool to have, image search was, at one time, the exception and not the rule. It was Jennifer Lopez‘s see-through tropical 2000 Grammy Awards dress that changed that for good.
After all, people wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. 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.
And there you have it. Schmidt went on to describe how Google Maps was born, and several other early 2000’s philosophies that helped lead to Google’s current dominance. You can read the full essay here.
