The origins of the name Google is a well-worn story, but worth repeating. The word googol describes an enormous number—a one followed by a hundred zeros—and was thus used as the basis of the name for a company whose aspiration was to be able to index the seemingly infinite amount of online information (note, however, that a googol is a staggeringly huge number: significantly larger than the number of atoms within the observable universe, let alone the mere contents of the web).
As to why Google isn’t called “googol,” explanations vary from the official version—that Google was simply a deliberately playful variant on googol—to the perhaps apocryphal story that this was the typo entered into a web browser when the company’s founders were first looking to see what web addresses were free.
What’s certain is that “to Google” has today become a far more widely used word than googol ever was, to the extent that it’s virtually synonymous with the act of searching for information online. We should probably be grateful that the name of the original search engine built by Google’s founders at Stanford in 1996—“BackRub”—was swiftly abandoned.53
Less well known is the story behind googol itself. The mathematical word was born in 1938 in the most informal of contexts, thanks to the mathematician Edward Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta.
Kasner asked young Milton to come up with a name for a very large number that “was not infinite, and therefore . . . had to have a name.” In response to his uncle’s query, Milton coined both the word googol and its partner, the still larger googolplex, which is ten raised to the power of a googol. A googolplex is so large that even writing it down in physical form—1,000,000,000,000,000 . . . and so on—would require more space than actually exists within the known universe.
Not that the internet hasn’t tried, of course. Wolfgang H. Nitsche’s webpage “Googolplex and other large numbers written out” allows you, for example, to run a program that might just generate a googolplex-worth of zeros on your screen, so long as you’re prepared to run your computer continuously for around half a millennium.
Edward Kasner popularized both googols and googolplexes in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination, coauthored with James R. Newman—although the latter is best known today thanks to the punning naming of Google’s headquarters in California, the Googleplex.
The latter term, incidentally, was used—in the form “googleplex”—by the British author Douglas Adams in the fourth episode of the 1978 radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity is named as an especially powerful supercomputer (although not as powerful as the computer Deep Thought, which dismisses its rival as achieving mere “pocket calculator stuff”).54 All good geeks should also know that the movie theater in cartoon series The Simpsons was christened Springfield Googolplex Theaters in March 1992 episode “Colonel Homer,” a cool six years before the eponymous corporation’s founding.