- The term "Google" is derived from the word "googol", which is a mathematical term for the number 1010010^{100}10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros).
- The term "googol" was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner.
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- Kasner used the term in his book Mathematics and the Imagination to illustrate the concept of large numbers.
- When Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, were brainstorming names for their search engine in 1997, they wanted a name that reflected the mission of organizing an enormous amount of information on the web.
- During a discussion, someone suggested "googol," but when they searched for the domain name, they accidentally misspelled it as "Google."
- They found the misspelling catchy and decided to keep it as the name of their search engine.
- Google started as a research project at Stanford University in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
- Their project, initially called "BackRub," analyzed backlinks to determine the importance of a website, which became the foundation of Google's search algorithm.
- In 1998, they incorporated the company and officially named it Google Inc.
The name "Google" reflects the company's ambition to provide access to vast amounts of information—essentially aiming to organize a "googol" of data on the internet in a user-friendly way.
This simple yet profound name has since become synonymous with internet search and is recognized globally.
