Search engine logos through the years

What changed, and what it usually meant

Search engine logos changed in four recurring ways between the mid-1990s and 2026: serif lettering gave way to plain sans-serif wordmarks, punctuation and shadows were stripped away, the mascots of the 1990s were retired or redrawn, and names were replaced when companies reorganized. Each signaled something different about the business.

• Typeface changes followed a change of medium. Google's 2015 move from a serif to a geometric sans came with a four-color "G" icon built for small screens.
• Punctuation and decoration reflected the era. Google borrowed Yahoo's exclamation point in 1998 and dropped it within a year; drop shadows and outlines vanished industry-wide around 2009–2013.
• Mascots — Ask Jeeves's valet, the Lycos Labrador, WebCrawler's spider — gave an engine a personality. Retiring one usually meant repositioning the product.
• Renames — MSN Search to Live Search to Bing; GnuHoo to the Open Directory Project to dmoz — tracked acquisitions and corporate rebrands, not changes in how the engine worked.

A logo is a statement about a brand, not an index: some of the largest technical changes in search came with no new logo, and some visible redesigns changed nothing underneath.

How the dates on this page were established

Every date here comes from the engine's English Wikipedia article, the logo file's description page on Wikimedia Commons, or the engine's own website as checked on 27 October 2026. Period homepage captures were not consulted, so "by 2019" means documented in use by then, not introduced then.

The record is uneven. Google's history is documented to the day, and DMOZ, Daum and Yandex have complete dated sequences. Elsewhere there are gaps: no dated MSN Search (1998–2006) or Windows Live Search (2006–2007) wordmark survives on Wikimedia; no Ask Jeeves-era logo (1996–2006) is held there either; Yahoo's red wordmark of 1996–2009, DuckDuckGo's pre-2014 logo and any Baidu history are missing; and 1990s engines such as Magellan, SavvySearch and ProFusion have no surviving logo in these sources at all.

Each logo is shown with the dates its source supports and no more, and doodles and holiday variants are excluded. The documented marks for every engine on this site, each labeled with its period of use, are collected in the gallery below.

The gallery: dated logos, engine by engine

Each engine below is shown oldest logo first, ending with its current or last logo. Labels give the period each version can be dated to from a published source.

Google

Microsoft Bing

DMOZ / Open Directory

Daum

Yahoo! Search

Startpage

AOL Search

Yandex

DuckDuckGo

Ecosia

Qwant

Mojeek

You.com

ChatGPT Search

Microsoft Copilot

Rambler

Wolfram Alpha

Ask.com

Lycos

WebCrawler

MetaCrawler

HotBot

TinEye

Google Scholar

Current and last-known logos of other engines

Logos are trademarks of their owners, shown only to identify the services this site documents. Files are reproduced from Wikimedia Commons and the services' own sites.

Google: from GIMP to a geometric sans

Google's logo history is the best documented in search.

• 1996–1997: the Stanford project ran as BackRub, with its own wordmark.
• 15 September 1997: the first Google wordmark, made by Sergey Brin in the free image editor GIMP.
• 28 September 1998: reset in Baskerville Bold, a serif, with a green "G."
• 30 October 1998: a Yahoo!-style exclamation mark, a heavier shadow and a blue "G."
• 31 May 1999: Ruth Kedar's design, based on Catull, an old-style serif drawn by Gustav Jaeger for Berthold in 1982; the exclamation mark dropped.
• 6 May 2010 and 19 September 2013: Catull refined, then flattened with shadows removed.
• 1 September 2015: Product Sans, a geometric sans-serif, with a four-color "G" favicon.
• 12 May 2025: the favicon gained a gradient echoing Gemini, Google's AI model.
• 19 May 2026: a slightly modified Google Sans with brighter colors.

The Catull wordmark lasted sixteen years while Google went from start-up to dominant engine. The 2015 change, in the year Google became a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet, was the only fundamental one. Google's own explanation is not among these sources, but the four-color "G" introduced with it points to the practical reason: fine serif detail does not survive at the size of a browser tab, and a single geometric letter does. The 2025 gradient tied the most familiar icon in search to an AI product.

Exclamation marks, outlines and the flat redesigns

The exclamation point began with Yahoo. Its 1994 directory logo was red with three small icons on each side; the familiar red Yahoo! wordmark with a black outline and shadow ran until May 2009, when a homepage redesign turned it purple and removed both. Yahoo!7 in Australia kept the red logo until 2014, and Yahoo! Japan still uses it. Google's brief exclamation mark of 1998–1999 shows how dominant Yahoo's brand then was: a new engine borrowed its punctuation.

Yahoo's later changes were tied to its leadership. On 7 August 2013 it announced "30 Days of Change," a different trial logo each day, and unveiled the final design on 5 September 2013; chief executive Marissa Mayer wrote that she spent a weekend designing it with the in-house team, aiming for "whimsical, yet sophisticated." The current corporate logo followed on 23 September 2019, two years after Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo's operating business, and a "Yahoo Search" lockup has been used since 2020. Both kept the exclamation point; their typefaces are not recorded in these sources, so the serif-to-sans story is told through Google.

The flattening — Yahoo in 2009, Google in 2013, Bing in 2013 — was a design fashion, not a change in the engines.

The mascots: retired, redrawn and returned

Of three defining 1990s mascots, only one actually disappeared.

Jeeves

Ask Jeeves answered in the persona of Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse's valet (not, strictly, a butler). The character was dropped in the United States in February 2006, when the site relaunched as Ask.com, months after IAC bought the company. A computer-generated Jeeves returned to the UK site in April 2009, and the name was retired entirely on 21 September 2016. The sources record the change, not the reasoning, but by then Ask had run its own Teoma-based index for four years, and a cartoon valet no longer fit the product. Ask.com closed on 1 May 2026; its farewell page said "Jeeves' spirit endures."

The Lycos dog

The Lycos logo pairs a black Labrador silhouette with a heavy LYCOS wordmark, although the name comes from Lycosidae, the wolf-spider family. A March 2008 logo file shows a dog-less wordmark with the tagline "meet you there," but the dog is documented again by January 2019 and was still on lycos.com on 27 October 2026; when it first appeared is undocumented.

WebCrawler's spider

WebCrawler's earliest documented wordmark, from 1995 or before, was set in Lithos, designed by Carol Twombly. After AOL bought the engine it introduced "Spidey" on 1 September 1995. A 2018 redesign brought an orange wordmark with a blue spider, so the spider survives in simplified form — and the redesign restored no index of WebCrawler's own.

Later mascots followed: HotBot relaunched in July 2011 with "a new robot-like mascot," and DuckDuckGo used Dax the duck from 2014 to 2023.

When the name changed, not just the logo

MSN Search to Bing

MSN Search launched in 1998 on licensed results and switched to Microsoft's own engine and index in late 2004 — its biggest technical change — without a rename. The renames came later: Windows Live Search on 11 September 2006, Live Search on 21 March 2007 (per Wikipedia), and Bing on 3 June 2009, after Microsoft judged that the word "Live" hurt the brand. Bing's lowercase blue launch wordmark gave way on 17 September 2013 to a flat yellow "b," a teal version in 2016 and, on 5 October 2020, the name Microsoft Bing beside Microsoft's four-square logo. The current ribbon "b" is captioned "since 2020," but its files date from February 2023 and Bing Chat; its exact debut is unconfirmed.

GnuHoo to dmoz

The volunteer directory launched as GnuHoo in June 1998, became NewHoo after Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to "Gnu," and became the Open Directory Project after Netscape bought it in October 1998. The boxed "dmoz" logo arrived in 1999; a March 2014 rebrand dropped the ODP name for four green "dmoz" tiles; a "DMOZ 3.0" logo followed in June 2016; and the site closed on 17 March 2017. Six marks in nineteen years, each tracking a change of name or owner.

Elsewhere, AOL's NetFind became AOL Search in 1999, Teoma was folded into Ask in 2006, and Ixquick merged into Startpage in 2016.

What a logo change usually signaled

• A new owner. MetaCrawler's red-swoosh wordmark dates from about 1997, when it was sold to Go2Net; Exalead adopted a logo with the Dassault Systèmes emblem in 2012, two years after Dassault bought it.
• A new strategy. Google's 2025 gradient echoed Gemini; Bing's ribbon mark rose with Bing Chat in 2023.
• A retreat to essentials. AltaVista's last logo came with a November 2002 "pared-down front page" and lasted until Yahoo redirected the domain in 2013.
• Nothing underneath. WebCrawler's 2018 redesign restored no index. Cuil, by contrast, kept one logo from its launch on 28 July 2008 until its servers went dark on 17 September 2010.

Some engines kept a designer of record. Yandex's first logo was made in 1997 by co-founder Arkady Volozh, modeled on that of its then parent CompTek; Art. Lebedev Studio has designed every version since, the latest announced on 31 March 2021 in Latin and Cyrillic forms.

The safest reading of any logo change is the narrowest: it shows what a company wanted its brand to say at that moment. Whether the engine still crawled the web, resold another's results or had stopped searching has to be established separately — which each engine's own page on this site does.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_logo
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Inc._(1995–2017)
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
• commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:DMOZ_logos
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos
• commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_Lycos.svg
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCrawler
• commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WebCrawler_logotype_1995.svg
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex_Search
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot