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Jan 25, 2018 · Google's name is a misspelling of "googol," a mathematical term for 10 raised to the power of 100. Learn how a nine-year-old boy, a typo, and a backlink program led to one of the biggest tech companies in history.
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Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. While setting up the Google engine, Page and Brin used the garage in their friend Susan Wojcicki's ...
- It's a Reference to an Astoundingly Huge Number
- How Much Is a Googol, Really?
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The Google name originated in 1997 when two Stanford University Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created web search engine technology called PageRank that analyzed the number of links pointing to sites (often called "backlinks") to determine page ranking results.
Originally, the pair called the technology "Backrub," as a playful pun on their analysis of backlinks. While looking for a better name with officemate Sean Anderson, someone suggested "googolplex," and Anderson mistakenly typed in "google.com" while looking to see if the domain name was available. A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. A googolplex is 10 raised by the googol power. (In an alternate version of the story, the trio reportedly encountered a web list of terms for very large numbers and found "google" misspelled near the top.)
So why pick a word that means a huge number as the name of your search engine? According to Google's 1999 company page, they picked the name because their "goal [was] to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters." And since it was a novel name and not just a common word, "Google.com" was available when the yet-to-be-incorporated company registered it in 1997.
In an interesting twist, the word "googol" itself might have been inspired by another kind of "Google." The mathematical term googol was originally coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner. In The Hidden History of Coined Words (2021), Ralph Keyes suggests that Sirotta might have been influenced by the popular newspaper comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, first published in 1919.
A googol is amusing because it's an absurdly large number: 10 to the 100th power. Here's a googol written out without any exponential notation: 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.
According to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, the total number of elementary particles in the observable universe is about 10 to the 80th power, still far short of a googol. And with only 1,880,000,000 websites on the net as of 2021, Google won't be indexing a googol of websites any time soon---or ever. But it's still a fun name for an impressive concept and a very impactful internet company.
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The very popular search engine called Google was invented by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The site was named after a googol —the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros—found in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman. To the site's founders, the name represents the immense amount of ...
Sep 4, 1998 · In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. was officially born. With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and former CEO of YouTube).
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.
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Aug 10, 2020 · Google, with its 118,889 employees, is a very successful and well-known company. In 2002, Yahoo offered Google $3 billion for the company. Google refused to accept anything less than $5 billion.
