How A Wrong Spelling Led To Google Getting Its Name

Today, we rely on Google to find information about anything and everything. From daily hacks to educational queries, we use the platform to clear almost all our doubts. But have you ever wondered why the search engine is called Google? Many users are now discovering the history behind its unusual name.

The origin of the title was revealed by a user who asked, “Is Google an acronym?” in an old post that recently went on Quora. This gave rise to a variety of accounts about the origins of the company’s name, as per the New York Post.

Computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched the company in 1998 while pursuing their doctorates at Stanford University. Contrary to popular belief, Google does not stand for “Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth.”

However, many pointed out that the famous letters in blue, red, yellow, and green are a play on the term “Googol,” not an acronym. For those who are unaware, that represents 10 raised to the power of 100, or 1 with 100 zeros behind it, in terms of arithmetic vocabulary. That is an almost unfathomably large number. Notably, Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, first used this expression in 1920. In his 1940 book “Mathematics and the Imagination,” Mr Kasner made several references to the figure. The boy reasoned that a quantity this large should have a name just as silly.

When Googol was proposed as the company’s name during the brainstorming session with Larry Page and colleagues, he asked his friend if that domain was still accessible. But the friend spelt the term incorrectly, turning it into “Google,” which Mr Page thought he liked better and Google Inc. was created. To put it another way, a typo in a search bar inspired the name of one of the most powerful search engines on the planet.

The popular search engine was originally going to be dubbed “Backrub”. The reason for the name was that the programme evaluated a website’s “backlinks” on the internet to determine its importance and the websites it was associated with. BackRub ran on Stanford servers until its bandwidth usage became unmanageable.