Where does Google get its name from?
April 25, 2009
Earlier this year I have been in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (which is the reincarnation of the ancient library of Alexandria) to attend a seminar called ‘Scinece Supercourse’. The supercourse is a collaboration between the library from Egypt and the University of Pittsburg in the US to create an open-source repository of lectures on the subject of Public Health created by University professors from allover the world to bring high-quality, free contet for teachers around the world. The site now boasts more than 3500 lectures and was successful in delivering lectures on hot topics like the Tsunami in 2004 and Avian Flu during its peak spread in 2007.
The aim of the meeting was to expand the current Supercourse and create parallel supercourses for Agriculture, Engineering and Environment. So those attending the meeting had some background in one of the 4 topics. Among the invited guests was Vint Cerf, who’s called by many the ‘Father of the Internet’ because he co-invented the protocol that governs the communication on the WorldWideWeb. He was invited because he was involved in creating the first supercourse and will participate in creating the new ones. And being a man of that stature, he was asked to speak about the future of ICTs and he mentioned some of the emerging techniques, the most amazing of which is inventing a new protocol for communication that would circulate between planets and through satellites!
When it was time for questions for Vint Cerf (who is also the Vice President of Google), a colleague wrote down a question about the origin of the name of Google. And since most of the questions revolved about big things like governmet consership to internet and open-source knowledge vs. copy rights, we thought that google question won’t survive. But those in charge of sorting out questions decided to conclude the session with the ‘”Where does the word ‘Google’ come from?”. The answer was that the famous word was actually a mispelling error by an atourney. When the founders of the famous search engine decided to create a company for it, they asked their lawyer to finish the papers for “googol” which is a mathematical word for the number ten to the power hundred (viz. one followed by hundred zeros) to denote the expansion of knowledge they hoped their company will create…but the misspelling from googol to the famous ‘google’ continued and entered the dictionay by itself to mean searching through the internet!
[...] Maged put an intriguing blog post on Where does Google get its name from? « A blog from the massesHere’s a quick excerptBut those in charge of sorting out questions decided to conclude the session with the ‘”Where does the word ‘Google’ come from?”. The answer was that the famous word was actually a mispelling error by an atourney. … (viz. one followed by hundred zeros) to denote the expansion of knowledge they hoped their company will create…but the misspelling from googol to the famous ‘google’ continued and entered the dictionay by itself to mean searching through the internet! … [...]
Who would guessed that?!
But yet again, I still don’t think it’s the true reason Google became Google. I heard once that it was meant to be “goggle” but they decided that “Google” sounds cooler.
I guess we must ask Google founders themselves to get a satisfying answer
I heard it from the vice-president of Google…so it’s pretty satisfying as far as I’m concerned