How Did Google Get Its Name?

The story behind the world's most-used search engine begins not in Silicon Valley but in a Columbia University mathematics lecture, with a question about numbers so large they have no physical meaning, and a nine-year-old boy who coined a word on the spot.

Edward Kasner and the Googol

Edward Kasner was a mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century who specialized in differential geometry. He was also, by all accounts, an exceptional teacher — the kind who believed that mathematical ideas should be accessible and vivid rather than abstract and dry.

In 1938, Kasner was trying to give his students a tangible sense of the difference between "a very large number" and "infinity." He chose to name an astronomically large but still finite number: 1010010^{100} — a 1 followed by 100 zeros. He turned to his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, and asked him to invent a name for it.

Milton said: "Googol."

The name stuck. Kasner published it in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination (co-authored with James Newman), which became one of the most widely read popular mathematics books of the 20th century.

Not satisfied with one coinage, Milton went further. He invented a name for an even larger number: a 1 followed by a googol of zeros, i.e., 101010010^{10^{100}}. This he called "Googolplex."

To appreciate the scale: there are estimated to be about 108010^{80} atoms in the observable universe, and perhaps 109010^{90} photons. A googol (1010010^{100}) is already far larger than the number of atoms in the universe. A googolplex is so vast that if you tried to write it out — one digit per Planck volume (the smallest meaningful physical volume, ≈10−105\approx 10^{-105} m³) across the entire observable universe — there would not be nearly enough space. The number of digits in a googolplex exceeds the number of any physical quantity in the observable universe.

Stanford, 1996: BackRub

Fast-forward to 1996 at Stanford University. Two doctoral students in computer science — Larry Page (24) and Sergey Brin (23) — were working on a research project about the World Wide Web's link structure.

Their core insight was that not all web pages are equally important. A page linked to by many other highly-linked pages should rank higher in search results than a page with few or low-quality links. They called their ranking algorithm PageRank (a pun: Page, as in web page, and Page, as in Larry Page) and built a search engine prototype around it.

The search engine's original name was unglamorous: "BackRub" — reflecting that it analyzed backlinks (links pointing to a page rather than from it). BackRub was effective — demonstrably better at returning relevant results than the existing search engines of the day (AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Yahoo). But "BackRub" was clearly not a name that would carry a company.

The Fateful Typo

In 1997, Page and Brin decided to rename the project. They wanted something that evoked the enormous scale of web data their engine was indexing.

A brainstorming session in Page's office included fellow student Sean Anderson. Anderson suggested "Googolplex" — the absurdly large number, implying the vastness of web information. Page shortened it to "Googol" — cleaner, more pronounceable.

Anderson immediately went to check whether the domain name googol.com was available. But he misspelled it: he searched for google.com instead.

It was available.

Brin apparently liked the accidental spelling better. On September 15, 1997, google.com was registered. The rest is history.

Why the Name Works

"Google" succeeds as a brand name for several reasons that branding experts frequently cite:

  • Short and pronounceable in any language: Unlike most company names, Google translates phonetically across most world languages
  • Unique and distinctive: There was no prior meaning to compete with — the word was not a common noun or verb before 1998
  • Memorable: The double 'o' and the playful sound make it sticky
  • Scalable: It evokes size (from googol) without being pretentious about it

The verb "to google" entered common use rapidly — arguably the most successful linguistic achievement in corporate branding history. The Oxford English Dictionary added it in 2006. To google something is now a cross-linguistic concept.

The Googleplex

When Google outgrew its initial garage-startup phase and moved to Mountain View, California, its sprawling corporate campus was christened "The Googleplex" — completing the mathematical chain that began with Kasner, passed through Milton Sirotta's invention of "googolplex," got shortened to "google" by a typo, and eventually became the name of a campus housing tens of thousands of people.

A minor irony: Despite being named after a mathematical concept suggesting incomprehensible vastness, Google has indexed only a few hundred billion web pages — a number dwarfed not just by a googol but by many mundane astronomical quantities. The name set ambitious expectations. So far, reality hasn't caught up.