Google Images launched 25 years ago as a simple word-based image search. Now celebrating its quarter-century anniversary, it's getting a major overhaul with a new homepage rolling out over coming weeks starting with desktop US English.

The new Collections feature resembles Pinterest, showing algorithmic recommendations before you type. The page updates in real time, and you can save images to collections for travel, outfits, furniture, and more. When search can't find the right image, you can generate one using Nano Banana 2 by describing it in the search box, appearing in the AI Overview blurb.

Google's blog post reveals the history: from 2001 launch, Similar Images in 2009 changed search to use images to find images. Search by Image arrived in 2011, evolving into Google Lens in 2018 for object identification and translation. This became Circle to Search, now on 580 million Android devices.