We use Google 's search engine every day , as well as the rest of the giant's products created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page 15 years ago . But where did the name Google come from and why did the two co-founders of the company choose it? Much has been written about the origin of the name Google, but it seems that the correct theory is the following.
Back in 1996, Page and Brin, graduate students at Stanford University, were trying to find a name for the search engine they were preparing. And its first name was BackRub, because of the analysis it performed on the back links of the web. A year later, however, Larry Page along with some other graduate students at Stanford, including Sean Anderson, were looking for new names for the engine, which was now undergoing rapid development and growth.
The brainstorming between them resulted in Sean Anderson suggesting the word googolplex, which Larry Page simplified by preferring googol (both words refer to two very large numbers that you can read about here). And the reason that the name appealed so much to Google executives is that they had as their vision and goal for their machine the management of a correspondingly huge amount of information on the World Wide Web.
But why Google and not Googol?
You may wonder, however, why the machine was not finally named Googol, but Google as we know it today. When Sean Anderson searched his computer to see if the name he and Larry Page had come up with was available, he made a mistake and searched for the domain google.com instead . Larry Page liked the new name, so within hours, he and Sergey Brin had registered google.com. It was September 15, 1997, the day google.com was “born,” although the company’s launch in Susan Wojcicki’s famous garage was actually a year later. The rest is history…
Source: digitallife.gr
