Google was born from a typo?

Did you know that the name Google, which we use every day, originates from a mathematical wordplay on ‘Googol,’ meaning the number 1 followed by 100 zeros?  There’s even a legend that the team originally intended to spell Google as ‘Googol,’ but misspelled it, resulting in the Google we see today?

For those who didn’t know the origins of Google, this article will unravel the mystery of where the word ‘Google’ comes from and reveal some surprising backstories you may not have known.

Google was actually originally called ‘BackRub’

Back in 1996 at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two PhD student partners, had the idea to create a search engine to gather vast amounts of information for people to search for, and chose to name it ‘BackRub’.

Sergey Brin & Larry Page

The reason they chose this name was because, at the time, the program they were using needed to analyze ‘backlinks’ (a massive number of links connecting content, keywords, or sets of information) to understand the importance of a website and to understand what content those links related to. BackRub was also the program supporting Stanford’s servers at the time.

How did Google come about?

Shortly after Brin and Page used the name BackRub, they felt it wasn’t serious enough or appropriate for the scale of the search engine they were building. They tried to find a name that accurately conveyed the fact that this search engine could store a vast amount of data. They chose to play with the word ‘Googol’.

Googol is derived from a mathematical term meaning the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This word was first defined by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old grandson of mathematician Edward Kasner. Brin and Page used it to reflect their ambition to create a search engine to organize the enormous amount of information available on the internet.

But the legend doesn’t end there. Initially, the founding team conceived the idea of ​​using ‘Googolplex’ to reflect their goal of organizing the limitless information on the internet. They later shortened it to ‘Googol’.

However, during the domain name registration and verification process, they accidentally misspelled it, resulting in ‘Google’ instead. This accidental mistake proved to be more to the team’s liking and became the name that made history in the technology industry.

Great success doesn’t need to be perfect from day one. Who would have thought that a world-class search engine like Google would have started from a mistake that became the most perfect coincidence.

You need to login in order to like this post: click here