'I'm Feeling Lucky'

The Q&A session

What to do when we are not sure of the correct spelling of a word? ― We ‘Google’ it.

What to do when we want to learn details about something? ― We ‘Google’ it.

What to do when we are not sure how to go to a place? ― We ‘Google’ it.

What to do when we don’t know ‘answers’ to certain ‘questions’? ― We ‘Google’ it.

The Back Story

The word ‘GOOGOL’(additional “O” & lack of “E”) is a mathematical term for the number 10 to the 100th power (1 followed by 100 zeros).CEO Larry Page decided that it would be the perfect name for his new company as it reflected the nearly unimaginable vastness of the Web.

“We want Google to be the third half of your brain.” ― Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin

Where does the 3rd ‘O’ go? From where does the ‘E’ dome from?

It was an accidental misspelling by one of Page’s classmates, Sean Anderson (think about the irony of him not having the services of Google available at that point to check his spelling’s correctness).Fellow Stanford student Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name. Sean suggested “googolplex,” and Larry wanted shortened form, “googol”…Sean made the mistake in spelling and searched for “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com”.

A Child's Wish

Words of wisdom are spoken by children at least as often as by scientists. The name ‘googol’ was invented by a child (Dr. Kasner‘s nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta) who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a hundred zeros after it; he suggested ‘googol’. He gave a name for a still larger number ‘Googolplex'(still a finite number): one followed by writing zeros until you got tired (S but different people get tired at different times), a googolplex is 1 with a googol of zeros, there would not be enough room to write it, if you went to the farthest star, touring all the nebulae and putting down more zeros every inch of the way.

Interesting tidbit: When Google began, the president of Yahoo! was Tim Koogle; some say the misspelling of ‘googol’ has the effect of punning his name.

Alas!!! It isn’t called “BackRub”(as initially perceived by Page & Brin), because that would have been a fun story to tell…

References:

1. David Koller’s personal Stanford site, Stanford classmate of Page

2. Modified excerpts from MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGINATION, Kasner and Newman, page 23