Fun Fact
The search engine has become so ubiquitous in our lives that it has become a verb! It was almost called “BackRub”, because it allowed users to search for things using backlinks. It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, not to mention that it doesn’t come across as the most appropriate name out there…
So, how did the founders of Google settle on the name? The spelling of it was an accident! Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming names for their business. One of their friends, Sean, also a graduate student at Stanford, suggested the name Googolplex.
You may be wondering “what is a googolplex?” It’s 10 to the power of googol. Googol is a mathematical term used to indicate one followed by one hundred zeros. Larry liked the shortened version of Googolplex, Googol, as it expressed that the search engine would be able to come up with extensive results. When buying the domain name, Sean did not use spell check and bought google.com instead!
Larry and Sergey didn’t mind the error and moved forward with their business which is now worth $1201 billion dollars.
Spelling errors aside, Google stayed true to the essence of its name and continues to be one of the world’s most popular search engines to this day!
- Jenna Dhanani