Google was named after a googol: the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Written as 10¹⁰⁰, it is a real mathematical quantity, not a number invented for the company. Google’s founders chose a different spelling, but kept the idea behind it: a name that suggested an enormous scale.
Before it was Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s search engine was called Backrub. The name referred to the links between web pages, which their early system used to help assess a page’s importance. As the project grew, “Google” offered a better way to express its ambition. The company’s account of its beginnings says the name reflected the founders’ aim to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful.
Why not simply call it Googol? In an early paper describing their search engine, Page and Brin wrote that “Google” was a common spelling of the mathematical word and suited their goal of building a very large-scale search engine. That explanation is more reliable than the often-repeated claim that the name resulted from an accidental typo. The spelling changed, but the reference to the number remained.
The number itself helps explain why the choice was memorable. A googol is far too large to picture by counting objects around you, yet its notation is simple: take a 1 and keep adding zeros until you have added 100. You do not need to write every digit to grasp the point. It is a compact way to talk about something extraordinarily big.
That makes Google’s name a small piece of math hiding in an everyday word. It also has company in the history of search: Yahoo’s name has its own unusual backstory. The next time you type “Google,” you are using a name inspired by a 101-digit number—and by the ambition to make a vast amount of information easier to find.