The origin of the word Google
What is the origin of the word Google? Millions google every day. But few know the history of the origin of the Google name.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, California, United States. Since then, most of us use Google as a basic tool of our lives.
Google currently handles 70 percent of the world’s search requests, making it the center of the user experience for millions of people on the web. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.
But where did the word Google come from?
The origin of the word Google
One of the curiosities of google is the origin of the name Google or why google is called like that.
While studying for a postgraduate degree in computing at Stanford University, United States, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders), dedicated themselves to designing a site that would classify websites, based on the number of pages that linked them.
And they decided to name it BackRub, which made references to the links or backlinks that would allow it to increase its ranking in the search engine.
In 1997 they wanted to give it a new name, something that would be more appropriate for their interests.
So Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to find a name for their project. And they found the mathematical word googol, which was created in 1930, to designate a number made up of a one followed by a hundred zeros.
Edward Kasner, an American mathematician, thought it was good to have a name for such a large number, and asked his nine-year-old nephew to come up with it, promising that many people would use it.
The boy proposed googol, which has since been widely used by mathematicians in all languages. Kasner later recounted how his nephew later proposed a name for an unimaginably larger number: a one followed by a googol of zeros, to be called a googleplex.
The company Google confirms that its name is inspired by the word invented almost eight decades ago and specifies that the term “reflects the company’s mission of organizing the immense amount of information available on the web and in the world” (AIN).
The Encyclopedia Britannica says that the origin of the name Google was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, googol .
In its beginnings, Google was only an Internet search engine, but now it offers more than 50 services and products on the Internet, from emails, maps and creator of documents, spreadsheets, among others.
Due to its range of services, it is one of the four most influential companies in the high-tech market, along with Apple, IBM and Microsoft.
However, online search remains its main service. So much so that we have adopted the word google (to google, in English), to refer to searching for something on the internet. In fact, in 2006 the Merriam-Webster dictionary included the term in English in 2006.
It offers a quick and easy way to find information on the web, with access to an index of more than 8,168 million web pages. According to the company, Google currently responds to more than 200 million queries a day.
What do you think of the history of the origin of the Google name?
