Why is Google named “Google” ?

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

Google

Why do we call a software defect a “Bug” ?

No matter how complex or simple a defect is, the term “Bug” is being used to describe defects from decades. But there is a very interesting story behind the origin of this terminology.

So the legend goes like this:

” In the late 1940’s, a large supercomputer was being built in the Harvard University Computer Science Laboratory under the code name Harvard Mark II. It was a huge electromechanical computer built up of a large number of relays and electromechanical switches. The project was funded by the US Navy and was capable of performing really complex mathematical computation’s like logarithm, exponential, reciprocal, square root all of which placed it way ahead of its time.

It was performing explicably until an error was discovered in its output. After hours of analysis, it was found out that the root cause of the error was a silk moth trapped in one of the relays thereby causing a short circuit and inducing an error in the output.

Grace Murray Hopper, a computer scientist who was working on Mark II discovered the first ever found computer bug. She glued the bug in a text book with the help of a tape as shown below:

This first very bug is still preserved in the National Museum of American history of the Smithsonian Institution.

Henceforth, the term “Bug” is being used to describe any defect in computers and “Debugging” is used to describe a phase when the computer is not working and the bug is being identified.

Key Details:

• Supercomputer Code name : Harvard Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator
• First bug was found on : 9th September, 1947
• Place of Discovery : Harvard University
• Scientist who Discovered : Grace Murray Hopper