From Googol to Google

What unites a mathematician at Stanford University of the '30s, an eight-year child with such a good imagination, a meeting room in California and a ”spelling” error? To meet you halfway, we give you two clues: Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. If that was not enough, know that the answer is “Google”.

Probably, at the heat of the moment, the names Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin will not tell you much, unless you are fond of computer and technology. Yet, what these two young Americans have invented is one of the most used tool by Internet users all around the world.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin are in fact the developers of the best known among all the Internet search engines: Google. Surely, it has happened that you have made a research on Google at least once. But have you ever wondered which origin has its odd name??

To unravel its etymology, it is necessary to go back to an antecedent. We are in 1938; the mathematician Edward Kasner, committed together with his colleague JR Newman in writing the essay Mathematics and the Imagination, decides to ask his eight-year nephew to invent a word that could designate the number 1 followed by 100 zeros (i.e. 1 X 10¹⁰⁰ ) to be included in his book. The child, Milton Sirotta, does not hesitate a moment to say a word that will remain in the history of modern physics: ”Googol”. Starting from this term, Kasner also coined the neologism <i>”Googolplex”</i> to indicate a large number tending to infinity. What connects this episode to the name of the search engine has been revealed in 2004 by David Koller, a researcher at the department of Computer Science of the prestigious Stanford University.

In an interview David said that in 1997 he participated, together with a group of students, in a project meeting organized by Brin and Page. The founders of the new company - whose original name was BackRub - were going to find a name referring to the mission, - the “purposes” - of the company, i.e. indexing the infinite content of information available on the Net.

One of the students attending the meeting, Sean Anderson, recalling the essay published sixty years before by Kasner, then suggested the term “googolplex”, to which the shorter form ”googol” was preferred..

Once the name was chosen, he made sure that it was not already present in the domain register published on the web (i.e. that the name had not been used or “ordered” by some other website) and that it could thus be deposited. Basing on the word pronunciation, Sean typed by mistake the sequence “google.com” instead of “googol.com”. The two researchers from California liked so much the new version of the word that they decided to use it permanently for their new invention.

Despite the recent foundation of the company, the ”Big G” - as sometimes Google is called friendly in the United States - has achieved in recent years such a success and popularity to be included in the dictionaries all around the world. As evidence of the reputation of this wonderful research tool, in French it was coined the verb googler, in German googeln and in Italian googlare to define “the action of making a web search”. In English to google has even become a lexeme in one of the most popular dictionaries - The Merriam Webster - and it is associated to the following definition:

To Google: to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web

Thank to the their genius, the young Google founders Mr. Brin and Mr. Page were awarded the prestigious Marconi Fellowship Award, prize assigned to them in Bologna in 2004. This acknowledged genius, matching well with the originality and freshness of ideas and of the “ways of expression”, is a constant that is continuously renewed in the Google team. Let’s think that last September, 29th 2009 , in order to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the company’s foundation, the logo “Googlle” with the double “L” reminding the number 11 appeared on the Google homepage ( in fact Google has been on-line for 11 years, since September 27th , 1998). And that was enough to make all the world media talk about the company and the Brand. So, happy birthday, Google!!!