YOU KNOW? HOW GOOGLE GET IT'S NAME



Google is a misspelling of a real-life mathematical term, googol.

Back sometime in the late 90’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two graduate students at Stanford. They had been working on a search engine and had given it the name BackRub.

Fortunately, they were smart enough to realize that BackRub was the worst tech company name in the history of tech companies, and that they needed to find something a little more appropriate.

During yet another name brainstorming session, their friend Sean, a fellow graduate student, suggested the word googolplex.

Googolplex is the name for 10 to the power of googol. Googol is the name used by mathematicians to reference 10 to the power of 100, or:

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

That’s 1 plus 100 zeros.

When Sean suggested googolplex, Larry responded that he liked the smaller term googol, but felt like the term in general was a great fit for what they were trying to do: index an unfathomable number of Internet web pages.

Sean, not realizing googol was spelled with an ol at the end, searched the Internet to see if the domain Google was available.

Larry liked the new word Sean had accidentally come up with.

And Google was named.