How a spelling mistake gave Google its famous name
In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted a name that represented the vast amount of information their search engine would organize. A friend suggested "googol," the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. When searching to see if the domain was available, another student accidentally misspelled it as "google.com." The founders liked the typo and registered it.
The Search Engine That Began as BackRub
In January 1996, two Stanford University doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began collaborating on a research project focused on web search. At the time, conventional search engines ranked query results primarily by counting how frequently a searched keyword appeared across a web page. Page and Brin theorized that a far more effective system could be built by analyzing the relationships and links between websites rather than relying strictly on keyword density.
To test their hypothesis, they developed an algorithm named PageRank, which evaluated the relevance and authority of any given website based on the number and quality of pages linking back to it. Because their system analyzed these incoming backlinks to determine an index score, Page and Brin nicknamed their original prototype BackRub. Working alongside lead programmer Scott Hassan, who contributed much of the underlying code, the team ran the crawler across Stanford's computing infrastructure, demonstrating that link-based ranking consistently produced superior search results.
The Search for a Name to Match the Scale
As the project outgrew its experimental phase and began to prove its practical utility, Page and Brin realized that BackRub was neither an appealing public brand name nor an accurate reflection of their grander ambitions. They wanted an identity that signaled the immense scale of the World Wide Web and their engine's goal of indexing and organizing vast amounts of information.
The brainstorming process eventually led to the mathematical concept of a googol. Coined decades earlier by Milton Sirotta, the young nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, a googol represents the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros (10 raised to the 100th power). For Page and Brin, the term served as a fitting metaphor for an index capable of cataloging an astronomical volume of online documents and making sense of the expanding internet.