How did Google get its name?

Google is a typo that nobody fixed. The founders meant to name their search engine after the googol, the number written as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

In 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, graduate students at Stanford, were building a search engine called BackRub. The name came from the way it analysed the links pointing back to a page. By September 1997 they wanted something better.

The best-known account comes from David Koller, who collected it in 2004 from colleagues in Stanford's Gates Computer Science Building. Page and a fellow student, Sean Anderson, were at the whiteboard in Page's office, room 360. Anderson suggested "googolplex." Page answered with the shorter "googol."

Anderson went to check whether the domain was taken, and he typed it as "google.com." It was free. Page liked the name, and within hours he registered google.com for himself and Brin. The registration is dated September 15, 1997.

The founders' own explanation is tidier. In an early paper they wrote that Google "is a common spelling of googol" and fit their goal of building very large-scale search engines. The company later said the name reflects a mission "to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web." Neither version dwells on the slip.

The number has a naming story of its own. Googol was coined by Milton Sirotta, the young nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner. Wikipedia dates this to 1920, when Milton was nine. Etymonline places it a year or two before Kasner's 1940 book, Mathematics and the Imagination, which made the word famous. Milton also proposed googolplex, at first "one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired." Kasner later fixed it as 10 to the power of a googol. Etymonline suggests the boy may have been influenced by the comic-strip character Barney Google.

Brin and Page incorporated the company on September 4, 1998, in their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park. The name soon became a verb. Etymonline finds "do a google on" by 1999 and "to google" by 2000. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary both added the verb in 2006.

So a child's word for an enormous number, misspelled by a graduate student, became the everyday word for looking something up.