Jennifer Lopez reboots iconic dress that inspired Google Image Search

Even fashion is tapping into the reboot craze, and it’s making us nostalgic for a classic 2000s Google origin story.

On Friday, a ferocious Jennifer Lopez closed out the Versace fashion show in Milan wearing a familiar ensemble. Stomping down the runway, Lopez wore an updated version of the iconic, barely-there green tropical dress she wore to the Grammys in 2000. 

All hail the queen.

The strut, the gown, the fact that 50-year-old Lopez is one of the most rockin’ stars of our age, broke, as they say, le internet. Twitter and Instagram hailed the fashion moment, the guts and beauty of Lopez, and the genius of Versace for runnin’ it back with such style.

That got the internet nostalgic for the year 2000, the dress, and another phenomenon (like JLo) that would change our lives forever: Google Image Search.

It’s a little-known fact that JLo’s Grammys appearance in her green Versace dress actually inspired the creation of Google Image Search.

Google, two years old at the time, noticed after the Grammys that search traffic spiked for Jennifer Lopez and her green dress. A visual search engine had been in the company’s sights for a while, but Google didn’t have the bandwidth to devote a team to the task just yet.

That didn’t stop one new engineer, Huican Zhu, from taking on the project himself. Along with then-product manager (now YouTube CEO) Susan Wojcicki, Zhu built the first version of Image Search himself in just six months. And thus, thanks to inspiration from Queen Lopez and her bellybutton, one of the internet’s most useful and ubiquitous products was born.

JLo has worn versions of the dress before, which has caused the Google story to surface in popular memory previously. But if we’re celebrating JLo’s green dress moment, we’d be loathe not to include the proverbial ships her image set sail.

No words.

With additional reporting by Sasha Lekach.