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Writer's pictureMorgan Fagg

Why didn't they Googol it?


While we take the computing power of Google for granted on any given day, the company was apparently named after the word Googol which according to Wikipedia.org was coined a century ago by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta.


A Googol is the name given to the large mathematical number 10 to the power of 100 which is 10,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000.


I won't bore you with some of the more complicated names given to a Googol but I find it funny that Google's founders misspelled Googol which I imagine was chosen to represent the large volume of information that their search engine could quickly sift through.


Ironically, the thing we use every single day to Google every single thing obviously didn't exist for Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and while I use Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Drive, and numerous other Google services such as Youtube.com on a regular basis, future generations will be asking why they didn't just G0000000000000000000000000000g0l the word.





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