Why is Google called Google

What is Google?

It is to be understood that though what we tend to conceive while we hear or read the term Google is the web search engine, Google Incorporated is actually an American multinational company; of which, the search engine is a part. The company is internationally famous for its various products and services that it provides over the internet. Some of the popular products of Google are the Google search engine; cloud computing, the Chrome browser, the Android OS and AdWords advertising revenue generation. Although, at its beginning and at its core, it was indeed the Google web search engine which started it all.

Google was founded on the 4th of September, 1998 by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It went public for the first time on the 19th of August in 2004 and today, the two founders own about 16% of the company’s total share hold. Google has its headquarters currently in Mountain View, California.

Why is it Called Google?

One may wonder as to why the company is named “Google” of all names and there is actually a few interesting facts associated with the name. Google is not just a random name that its founders came up with, rather it has a story. Google does not stand for anything, nor is it an abbreviation of anything; it was derived from the term “GOOGOL.”

Googol is a term that is used to describe a number in which is 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

Googol = 10000000000,0000000000,0000000000,0000000000,0000000000, 0000000000,0000000000,0000000000,0000000000,0000000000.

This term was given to this large number by Milton Sirotta, better known as the nephew of the famous US mathematician, Edward Kasner. The term Googol became more familiar to people around the world, largely due to the book written by Kasner himself and James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination.

The term Google was derived from Googol intentionally to denote the company’s efforts in organizing all the information that is circulating on the internet. The vastness of the ever increasing information and the enormity of the effort are quite appropriately represented by the term “Google.”

It is held that though Google as a name is a huge success today, it was perhaps a simple misspelling of the term Googol on the part of the investors of the company that “Google” ever came to exist. Apparently, a certain check from the investors was written to “Google” instead of “Googol” and that is how Google came into being. There are however, other stories too. As Larry page himself once said, it was a mistake by some of the workers at the company itself. On the other hand, Google’s corporate page in the year 1999 clearly stated that it was a “choice” rather than a “mistake”, because Google “sounds cool” and simply because they liked the term better than Googol. The other opinion regarding the origin of the name Google is that it is the most common spelling (rather misspelling) of Googol.