I was at a name generation brainstorm gathering the other night and it got me thinking about popular company names that seem out of the norm. Of course Google came top to mind. So what's the thinking behind it anyway? Well it turns out to be a very smart concept...
A googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929-1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Milton was nine years old at the time. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination (1940). (From Wikipedia)
Google wanted to use Googol, but was told that they could not use this name due to copyright issues, so they purposely decided to misspell it, resulting in google (which I think is "nicer looking" and easier to remember anyhoo).
JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING: In the past 12 months, Google doubled its staff, tinkered with its search engine to speed up results, and now answers more queries than Microsoft and Yahoo combined.
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