Google, A Simple Mistake!

The name "Google"

The name "Google" is a misspelling on the word googol.

Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this word in 1938, for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It is said that the word "googol" was chosen to represent this number because it sounded like baby talk. Google uses this word because the company wants to organize a very large quantity of information on the Web. Andy Bechtolsheim first thought of the name.

The name for Google's main office, the "Googleplex," is a play on a different, even bigger number, "googolplex," which is 1 with 1 googol zeros.

History

Google began as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. (smart) students at Leland Stanford University, USA. They made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company went to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California. Then, later that year, it went to the "Googleplex".

In September 2001, Google's ranking system ("PageRank", for saying which information is more helpful) got a U.S. Patent. The patent was to Leland Stanford University, with Lawrence Page as the inventor (the person who first had the idea)