As Larry Page, the co-founder of Google.com narrates:
\n\u201cLucas Pereira: \u2018You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!\u2019 But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell \u2018Googol\u2019 \u2018Google\u2019, so it worked out OK in the end.\u201d
\nor
\naccording to Google corp. 1999:
\n\u201d 10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling \u201cGoogle\u201d better. We picked the name \u201cGoogle\u201d because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters.
\nor
\naccording to Google corp now:
\nGoogol is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, \u201cMathematics and the Imagination\u201d by Kasner and James Newman. Google\u2019s play on the term reflects the company\u2019s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.\u201d
\nor
\nWikipedia version:
\n\u201cThe original founders were going for \u2018Googol\u2019, but ended up with \u2018Google\u2019 due to a spelling mistake on a check that investors wrote to the founders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Origin of the name \u201cGoogle\u201d<\/p>\n
From time to time I read or hear stories of the origin of the search engine and company name \u201cGoogle\u201d that are incorrect, which prompts me to write this brief account, based on my understanding of the genesis of the name. The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.
\nIn 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine \u201cBackRub,\u201d named for its analysis of the web\u2019s \u201cback links.\u201d Larry\u2019s office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year.<\/p>\n
David Koller:
\nSean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name \u2013 something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word \u201cgoogolplex,\u201d and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, \u201cgoogol\u201d (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as \u201cgoogle.com,\u201d which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name \u201cgoogle.com\u201d for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).<\/p>\n
David Koller (dk@cs.stanford.edu), January, 2004<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Larry Page, the co-founder of Google.com narrates: \u201cLucas Pereira: \u2018You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!\u2019 But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell \u2018Googol\u2019 \u2018Google\u2019, so it worked out OK in the end.\u201d or according to Google corp. 1999: \u201d 10^100 (a gigantic number) is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrmclaughlin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}