The American tech giant Google is regarded as a dominant platform for users searching for things on the internet but people have been wondering how it got its name.
The debate was started when a person on the question answers platform on the internet asked: “Is Google an acronym?”
It triggered responses and theories from people who traced the name of the company when it was founded by computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 while they were completing their PhD at Stanford University, according to the New York Post.
Some theorised, albeit incorrectly, that Google stands for the “Global Organization of Oriented Group Language of Earth.”
On the other hand, some suggested that the iconic blue, red, yellow and green letters are a play on the word “Googol.”
According to the outlet, that’s arithmetic vocabulary for 10 raised to the power of 100 or 1 with 100 zeroes behind it — an almost inconceivably huge number.
The term was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, who frequently referenced the figure in his 1940 book “Mathematics and the Imagination.”
When the founders were thinking about the name, someone suggested Googol, to which the tech experts asked whether the domain was available.
But the friend misspelled the word as “Google,” which Larry Page decided to prefer.