Posted by Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow and SVP of Google Research and Health, on behalf of the entire Google Research community

When I joined Google over 20 years ago, we were just figuring out how to really start on the journey of making a high quality and comprehensive search service for information on the web, using lots of curiously wired computers. Fast forward to today, and while we’re taking on a much broader array of technical challenges, it’s still with the same overarching goal of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. In 2020, as the world has been reshaped by COVID-19, we saw the ways research-developed technologies could help billions of people better communicate, understand the world, and get things done. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, and excited about new possibilities on the horizon.