Is there some kind of history behind the name 'Google' or was it just a random choice?
Answers (7)
Google derived its name from the word "googol", a term coined by then nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. The story goes, Kasner had asked his nephew to invent a name for a very large number - ten to the power of one hundred (the numeral one followed by 100 zeros), and Milton called it a googol. The term was later made popular and in Kasner's book, Mathematics and the Imagination, which he co-authored with James Newman. Later, another mathematician invented the term "googolplex", which represents ten to the power of a googol - a substantially larger number.
Some useful links about Google:
As Google is now the world's most popular search engine, its association with a number so vast is appropriate. According to www.google.com, "Google's use of the term [Google] reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web."* In fact, this mission itself grows increasingly large daily, as the Internet continues to grow exponentially throughout the world.
History of Google
In 1995, Google's founding partners Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at Stanford University, where they began to collaborate on a search engine called BackRub. As this highly promising project developed, the two students managed to attract investors, and Google Inc. opened for business on September 7, 1998 in Menlo Park, California - like many promising IT companies, in a sublet garage. The company grew rapidly, along with site traffic, and in 1999 Google was named in Time magazine's Top Ten Best Cybertech list.
In recent years, Google has introduced a host of useful new features and products, including Google AdWords pay-per-click service, AdSense, the Google toolbar, and Froogle, a shopping search service first launched in December 2002. Finally, in 2004, the company went public, using an innovative electronic auction program to sell initial shares.
Despite becoming a corporate monolith, Google has retained its hip, youthful image, and its dynamic corporate culture with an accent on fun (e.g., skateboarding in the parking lot) remains intact.
For more detailed information about the founding and development of Google, click here.
Languages of Google
Google may be used in many languages - even Esperanto! Just click on the links below.
- Afrikaans
- Albanian
- Amharic
- Arabic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Basque
- Belarusian
- Bengali
- Bihari
- Bork, bork, bork!
- Bosnian
- Breton
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- Elmer Fudd
- English
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Faroese
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- Frisian
- Galician
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Guarani
- Gujarati
- Hacker
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Interlingua
- Irish
- Italian
- Japanese
- Javanese
- Kannada
- Klingon
- Korean
- Kurdish
- Kyrgyz
- Laothian
- Latin
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Malay
- Malayalam
- Maltese
- Marathi
- Mongolian
- Nepali
- Norwegian
- Norwegian (Nynorsk)
- Occitan
- Oriya
- Persian
- Pig Latin
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
- Punjabi
- Romanian
- Russian
- Scots Gaelic
- Serbian
- Serbo-Croatian
- Sesotho
- Sindhi
- Sinhalese
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Somali
- Spanish
- Sundanese
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Tigrinya
- Turkish
- Turkmen
- Twi
- Uighur
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Uzbek
- Vietnamese
- Welsh
- Xhosa
- Yiddish
- Zulu
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, a Ph.D. student at Stanford[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies.[2][3][4][5] In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[6] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[7]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[6] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[2] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[6] Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point.[6] To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[6] Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[6][8] A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.[9]
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:[10]
actually,google got it's name from the number googol(please don't mix googol with googolplex) 2 scientists actually created it in the 1800s or the 1900s.I don't quite know,after all,I'm just a 9 year old bookworm(75 to 85 science books read)anyway,googol has 100 zeros in it while googolplex,on the other hand,actually has googol zeros(100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 zeros)okay that's it
"to search (something) on the Google search engine," 2000 (do a google on was used by 1999). The domain google.com was registered in 1997. A verb google was an early 20c. cricket term in ref. to a type of breaking ball.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=google
The site's name is apparently derived from "googol", but note the difference in spelling.
The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/google?r=66
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
that really has nothing to do with were it got its name....