googol

programming ops culture

The digit one followed by a hundred zeros, and the word Google is a misspelling of it.

Chosen to suggest the scale of the index the founders intended to build. The mathematical term itself was coined by a nine-year-old asked to name a very large number.

Also known as: google name origin

Sources

Brin & Page, 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', Computer Science Department, Stanford University: "We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10^100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines." The paper does not name the child who coined the mathematical term

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