A googol - a term coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton, nephew of American mathematician EDward Kansar - is used to describe the large number, that is, the digit 1 followed by a hundread zeros. The search engine Google was named afer this number. The original founders were going for "googol", but ended up with "google ", due to a spelling mistake. Ultamately, this was good, bacause google.com was available and googol.com was not.
There was one another reason of selecting "google" because it is an easy word for lip marketing and to spell.
There was a post about this a couple of days back. Anyhow, heres a little more about the company. The Company Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page to make it easier to find high-quality information on the web. The company is based on three years of research in web search and data mining done by the founders in the Stanford University Computer Science Department. Google Inc.'s headquarters are located in scenic downtown Palo Alto, California. Google Inc. is not at present a publicly traded company, and we are currently unable to speculate on whether or when our privately-held status might change. The Name 10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling "Google" better. We picked the name "Google" because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters. http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/ Do you like this design ???
Well thats always good to hear abt the BIG G... They wud be keepin an eye here too... Mr. Eric wud be too happy these days... Manish
Coming to think of it, they still don't really have a design, their pages all look simple and the logo is not that great. Makes you realize that design really doesn't matter that much. I'm glad that they didn't brand themselves as "backrub" which was their original name. That name wouldn't have done too well as a brand, even though it made sense describing their algo to some extent.
lol would you ever say "Just BackRub it!"? I wouldn't. I think Google proves that power lies in simplicity.
Imagine in 1997-1999 when someone thought of buying the name google.com first, I just wonder what happen
There is a book out about Google and its history and I found this information in there as well. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/055380457X/104-6304201-5119960?v=glance&n=283155