Why is Google called Google? (2024)

Even if you’re not on the web 24/7, Google plays a major role in your daily life in 2018.

The internet megalodon has been going for 20 years now (imagine the total number of searches!) after starting out as a basic search engine.

It’s the most-visited website in the world, and the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai is thought to be worth £900m in 2018.

But where did Google gets its name, what does it mean and who chose the title?

The name Google was designed to be a twist on the word ‘googol’.

A googol is a very large number, which is equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros and expressed as 10to the power 100.

Therefore, the name signified that the website would be providing a lot of information, which is certainly accurate.

Before being called Google, its foundersLarry PageandSergey Brin called it BackRub, because the search engine relied onbacklinks to estimate the importance of sites.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, a year after Brin and Page began developing the project as Stanford University PhD students.

And the first ever Google search happened in 1998, when Page and Brin were demonstrating the accuracy of Google compared to other search engines.

The pair were showing computer scientist John Hennessy, now known as the ‘godfather of Silicon Valley’, their work on the search software.

Hennessy typed in the name Gerhard Casper, who was the president of Stanford at that time.

Instead of getting results for Casper the Friendly Ghost, as he did on rival search engine AltaVista (founded in 1995), up popped links to the human being Gerhard Casper, the one he’d been hoping to find.

This is the first recorded Google search, but nowadays almost every anxiety and random thought produced by humanity and stuffed in the search box is stored in Google’s servers.

They also have recorded pictures of every place on earth and have produced maps of every planet in the solar system.

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