January
-We kick off January with the launch of Picasa for Mac at Macworld.
-The Vatican launches a You Tube Channel, providing updates from the Pope and Catholic Church.
-Together with the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the Planet Lab Consortium, and academic researchers, we announce Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that provides tools to test broadband connections.
February
-The latest version of Google Earth makes a splash with Ocean, a new feature that provides a 3D look at the ocean floor and information about one of the world's greatest natural resources.
-We introduce Google Latitude, a Google Maps for mobile feature and an iGoogle gadget that lets you share your location with friends and see the approximate location of people who have decided to share their location with you.
-After adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician, Google Translate is capable of automatic translation between 41 languages, covering 98% of the languages read by Internet users.
-Our first message on Twitter gets back to binary: I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010. (Hint: it's a button on our homepage.)
March
-We launch a beta test of interest-based advertising on partner sites and on You Tube. This kind of tailored advertising lets us show ads more closely related to what people are searching for, and it gives advertisers an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products or services.
-We release Google Voice to existing Grand Central users. The new application improves the way you use your phone, with features like voicemail transcription and archive and search of all of your SMS text messages.
-We celebrate our San Francisco office's Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. We see it as a sign that we're on track with our approach to building environmentally friendly offices.
-The White House holds an online town hall to answer citizens' questions submitted on Google Moderator.
-We launch new iGoogle backdrops inspired by video games, including classics like "Mario," "Zelda," and "Donkey Kong."
-We announce Google Ventures: a venture capital fund aimed at using our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies.
-Using our transliteration technology, we build and release a feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type messages in Indian languages like Hindi or Malayalam.
-Google Suggest goes local with keyword suggestions for 51 languages in 155 domains.
April
-Our April Fool's Day prank this year is CADIE, our "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity" who spends the day taking over various Google products before self-destructing.
-We announce an update to search which enables people to get localized results even if they don't include a location in their search query.
-For India's 15th general election, we launch the Google India Elections Centre, where people can check to see if they're registered to vote, find their polling place, as well as read news and other
information.
-Over 90 musicians from around the world — including a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player — perform in the first-ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
-We rebuild and redesign Google Labs as well as release two new Labs: Similar Image search and Google News Timeline. Later in the month, we introduce Toolbar Labs.
-We begin to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. search pages when people search for names, giving people more control over what others find about them when they search on Google.
-We release 11 short films about Google Chrome made by Christoph Niemann, Motion Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul, and Pantograph.
May
-To clear brush and reduce fire hazard in the fields near our Mountain View headquarters, we rent some goats from a local company. They help us trim the grass the low-carbon way!
-At our second Searchology event, we introduce a few new search features, including the Search Options panel and rich snippets in search results.
-We launch Sky Map for Android, which uses your Android phone to help you identify stars, constellations and planets.
-Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, wins the second U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition with her doodle "A new beginning."
-At our second annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, we preview Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration tool.
Labels: Google milestones, Google2009, Milestones 2009
