Why Google is called Google

We say it every day, it is even a word in the VanDale and the company has become an integral part of not only the tech world, but the world in general. google. But, where does that name come from?

The name Google

Google was founded in the late 90s. Initially, it did not immediately bear the name we know today. Two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had developed a search engine technology called PageRank. At first it was even called Backrub, which was a nod to ‘backlinks’, because the search engine revolves around the number of links pointing to a particular site. The more links, the higher the page is ranked.

Still, that name wasn’t quite what they were looking for. Backrub (which also means back massage by the way) was not. They and their colleague Sean Anderson went in search of another name. That name was supposed to be Googolplex, but Anderson typed it wrong. He typed Google.com into the domain name website. Actually nice, because a ‘googol’ also exists. A ‘googol’ is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. A ‘googolplex’ is 10 plus that googol. That’s how the men got on Google.

googol

At least that’s one story. Another story tells that although the three men were looking for the name, they came across an internet list of terms for big numbers and that “google” was at the top, spelled wrong and that. Either way, the men were clearly fascinated by that idea of ​​gig numbers. That’s because their goal was to make large amounts of information available to everyone. It also sounds cool and only has six letters, according to Google, which officially registered the name in 1997.

A ‘googol’ is written like this: 10,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000.​ 000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000.​000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000,000.​000. 000.000. This term was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of noted mathematician Edward Kasner. How did he come up with ‘googol’? Probably from a newspaper strip called Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Also interesting: ‘googol’ in Somali means ‘stop it’.

Large numbers of

That’s not coming for the time being: with its own brand, major partnerships with Samsung, among others, the purchase of Fitbit, the ownership of YouTube and of course Android, even if it were to stop the popular search engine, Google is far from gone. So in that sense that name based on large numbers wasn’t so bad: Google is now one of the most powerful, wealthiest companies in the world.

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