Did they Google it?
Google may be one of the most popular search engines on the planet, but many people have wondered where its unusual name came from.
The origin of the title was revealed through a post that resurfaced on the forum platform. QuoraIn it, one user asked, “Is Google an acronym?”
This has led to a variety of theories about the origin of the company’s name, which was founded in 1998 by computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were doctoral students at Stanford University.
Some people mistakenly assume that Google stands for “global organization of directional group languages on Earth.”
But as many astute users have pointed out, the iconic blue, red, yellow, and green letters aren’t an abbreviation, but a play on the word “Googol.” For the uninitiated, that’s the arithmetic term for 10 to the power of 100, or the number 1 with 100 zeros after it, which is roughly An unimaginably huge number.
Interestingly, the term was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. This diagram appears in his 1940 book “Mathematics and Imagination.”
The boy’s idea was that such an absurd quantity deserved an equally absurd name.
When Larry Page and co. were brainstorming names for the company, someone suggested calling it “Googol,” so the tech mogul asked a friend if the domain was available.
However, the friend apparently misspelled the word as “Google,” so Page decided it sounded better, and Google Inc. was born.
In other words, one of the most powerful search engines on the planet is named after a typo in the search bar.
Stupidity aside, Google probably wants to go straight to the labels Page and Brin have pretty much chosen.
Initially, the pair planned to name the ubiquitous search engine “Backrub” because the program would use backlinks for searches.
As All That’s Interesting succinctly puts it, “If you’re happy to be able to ‘Google’ something instead of ‘Backrubbing’ it, you should be thanking typos, sheer numbers, and nine-year-old boys.”
