Everyone is much aware about the search engine giant Google and its several other outstanding products and services. But there is an interesting story behind the origin of the company’s name “Google”.
Initially, when the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began co-ordinating on a search engine in 1996, they named it “BackRub”. It was named BackRub because of its ability to consider backlinks while estimating the importance of sites and relevance of pages.
Larry’s office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with graduate students Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira.
So BackRub operated on Stanford servers for more than a year and eventually started utilizing too much bandwidth to suit the University. Larry and Sergey started to realize the need to move the search engine to a new name.
In September,1997 Larry and his office mates had a session for finding a better more suitable name for the search engine. Larry and Sean were in their office, working on a whiteboard trying to come out with some name that could reflect the immense amount of data the search engine could handle. Sean suddenly suggested the name “GoogolPlex” (Googol referring to large amount of data). Larry quickly responded verbally with the shortened form “Googol”(Mathematically, Googol refers to a large number 10^100 i.e a 1 followed by 100 zeros).
Sean who was sitting at his computer terminal immediately ran a search through the Internet domain name registry database to enquire if the domain name was still available for registration and use. However, Sean misspelled the original name from “Googol” to “Google” and found it to be available in the database. The domain name was available and Larry liked it too.
Within hours, they took the step of registering the domain name to Larry and Sergei and the name Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997 (according to the domain name registration record).
I like the way a misspelling led to one of the most popular names in the world. That’s something I find really admiring about this story. Hope you liked it too.
Milestones:
BackRub
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