Jenny from the internet: Jennifer Lopez' Versace dress was the inspiration behind Google's image search, says Eric Schmidt

Home »Jenny from the internet: Jennifer Lopez' Versace dress was the inspiration behind Google's image search, says Eric Schmidt

Jenny from the internet: Jennifer Lopez' Versace dress was the inspiration behind Google's image search, says Eric Schmidt

Posted by sciencetech-blog on Wednesday, April 8, 2015 Label:

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Fifteen years ago, Jennifer Lopez' shimmering, navel-baring Versace gown captivated the world

Fifteen years ago, Jennifer Lopez' shimmering, navel-baring Versace gown captivated the world.

So much so that, long before Kim Kardashian was breaking the internet, J Lo's 2000 red carpet appearance set the web ablaze.

It even caught the attention of Google executive, Eric Schmidt, who has revealed that the plunging dress was his inspiration for creating Google Images.

'When Google was launched, people were amazed that they were able to find out about almost anything by typing just a few words into a computer,' he told project-syndicate.com.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin – like all other successful inventors – kept iterating, said Schmidt. They started with images, because 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,' added Schmidt.

'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: J Lo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.'

Before Google Image Search, web surfers could only search through a page of text divided by 10 blue links.

This meant they first had to click on these links before finding out if J Lo's dress was featured.

When Google Images was launched in July 2001, the site offered access to 250 million images. Just ten year later, that figure reached more than 10 billion.

The dress is one of the few articles of specific clothing to be honoured its own Wikipedia page.

After hearing the news, the 45-year-old singer shared an old picture of her in that dress on Instagram.

She added: 'WHO KNEW!! #onepersoncanchangetheworld #onedresscanchangetheworld #jlo+versace=history #positivechange #funfacts LOL'

The dress caught the attention of Google executive, Eric Schmidt (pictured), who recently revealed that it was his inspiration for creating Google Images

Google has big plans for its image search. A team of Google researchers recently developed an advanced image classification and detection algorithm called GoogLeNet, which is twice as effective than previous programs.

It is so accurate it can locate and distinguish between a range of object sizes within a single image, and it can also determine an object within, or on top of, an object, within the photo.

The software recently placed first in the ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge (ILSVRC).

Google has made the software open to other developers, to help increase its accuracy, and in the future, the technology could be used to improve Google Image searches.

It could also scour YouTube videos for specific objects or shapes.

PRINT YOUR PHOTOS OR RISK LOSING THEM, CLAIMS GOOGLE BOSS

He may have helped to build the internet, but Dr Vinton 'Vint' Cerf has urged computer users to print out their most treasured photographs, or risk losing them.

The Google vice president warned that as operating systems and software become more sophisticated, documents and images stored using older technology will become increasingly inaccessible.

He went on to say that our dependence on technology could lead to the 21st century being a new dark age in history, with any evidence of our culture lost in a digital 'black hole'.

In centuries to come, future historians looking back on the current era could be confronted by a digital desert comparable with the dark ages - the post-Roman period in Western Europe about which relatively little is known because of the scarcity of written records.

Dr Cerf, who also has the title of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, said: 'If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?

'We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.'

The Tinkerer's Apprentice by Eric Schmidt - Project Syndicate

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