Is there some kind of history behind the name 'Google' or was it just a random choice?
Answers (77)
There is an unconfirmed story that the name Google actually came from a spelling mistake which one of the investors did while writing the investment check for the company. The name of the company was Googol and the investor wrote Google. Now you are thinking that what is Googol A googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by 100 zeros. It looks something like this below..
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.
Yes that’s just a single number I hope your eyes aren’t rolling. The idea behind the concept was to tell the world that how much information Google is willing to process on the world wide web.
Google (ˈɡo͞oɡ(ə)l obtained it's name from a casual conversation the founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) had one day. They were talking about what number is the the absolute largest number (hundreds, thousands, millions, etc.) They were debating the legitimacy of "Infinity" as the answer. Larry took the position that infinity is a concept, not an actual number. They took their debate to a local library, but failed to find a sufficient answer. They realized that there was not an easy way to find answers for simple and meaningless questions. Thus, they developed Google, a solution to their problem. Near the end of development, they found that the answer to their question was the number "Googol" which is a 1, followed by 100 zeros. 1,0000000000000000etc. they modified the word for copyright reasons, and thus, Google was born.
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[11][12][13] Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol",[14][15] the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.[16] Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.[17][18]
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This is the single most detailed yet accurate answer I have ever seen. A + for research.