What does the word ‘Google’ mean?

We all know what Google is. It’s a company that runs our lives. Even in semi-rural areas, Google is a household name and everyone is familiar with its logo. Especially the search engine, Google Chrome, has become synonymous with searching for anything on the internet. Gmail and YouTube are the next 2 most popular product with billions of users. However, compared to its immense popularity, very few people know that ‘Google’ is a name that comes from a very special mathematical term – coined by a child – many years ago!  

Where did the word ‘Google’ come from? 
It was the year 1938. Mathematician Edward Kasner was working busily on massive numbers related to the size of the universe. While that might sound crazy, it’s something mathematicians and physicists have been trying to do since Aristotle and Aryabhatta’s times. Kasner had a 9 year old nephew, Milton Sirotta, who was already a bright boy. So Kasner asked the child, what would he call the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The boy decided it’s a ‘googol’. Sirotta grew up to be a mathematician as well.  

Meanwhile, the idea of googol also evolved to ‘googolplex’, which is the biggest number imaginable, and is used to understand how many electrons make up the universe! Closer home, it’s also used to figure out all possible ways of winning a chess game.  

But how did googol become Google? 
In the year 1998, i.e. exactly 60 years after the term ‘googol’ was coined, Stanford University Ph. D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page were working on naming their start-up venture. Both of them wanted to name it after a really huge number, since the essence of their company lay in searching and finding endless sources of data online. Sean Anderson, another Stanford graduate student present at the brainstorming session, did an internet search for the name ‘googolplex’ to see if it was available as a website domain. But Anderson misspelled it as ‘Google.’ This was available as domain name, and Larry Page liked it. So he registered it and within a few hours, Google was born. While the size of the universe is still under debate, there is no doubt that Google has changed our lives forever.