The Secret Meaning Behind Google’s Name Leaves Internet Users in Shock
Some incorrectly theorized that Google stands for the “Global Organization of Oriented Group Language of Earth.” Christopher Sadowski
Did they Google it?
Google may be one of the most popular search engines on Earth, but many people are just now discovering how it got its unusual name.
The origin of the title’s name came to light through a post that resurfaced on the forum platform Quora, where a user inquired: “Is Google an acronym?”
This led to a slew of theories regarding the origin of the company’s name, which was founded by computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 when they were PhD students at Stanford University.
Some mistakenly assumed that Google stands for “Global Organization of Oriented Group Language of Earth.”
Corbis via Getty Images
However, as several astute users pointed out, the distinctive blue, red, yellow, and green letters are not an acronym but a play on the word “Googol.” For the uninitiated, this is the mathematical term for the number 10 raised to the power of 100, or 1 followed by 100 zeros—a number unimaginably large.
Interestingly, this term was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, who referenced this number frequently in his 1940 book “Mathematics and the Imagination.”
The boy’s logic was that such a ridiculous quantity deserved an equally silly name.
When Larry Page and his team were coming up with a name for their company, someone threw out the idea of calling it Googol. Then, Page asked a tech officer friend if that domain was available.
However, it seems the friend misspelled the word as “Google,” which Page decided he preferred, and thus Google Inc. was born.
In other words, one of the world’s most powerful search engines was—rather fittingly—named after a typo in the search bar.
Despite the silliness, it might be better for Google to stick with the name Page and Brin nearly chose.
The duo originally planned to name the comprehensive search engine “Backrub” because the program uses backlinks to search.
As the website All That’s Interesting succinctly put it, “If you’re happy you can ‘Google’ something instead of ‘BackRubbing,’ you can thank a typo, an incredibly large number, and a 9-year-old boy.”
