Ginormous search engine Google is the most popular site in the world and even went on to become a verb.
It’s hard to you imagine a time when you couldn’t just ‘Google it’ but the site almost had a very different name.
In 1996 Google was initially given the less catchy title of ‘BackRub’.
A year later when they began developing the site more, they thankfully developed the name too.
When Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming a new name for the site with some classmates, Sean Anderson suggested googolplex. Page then suggested it be shorted to Googol.
A googol is 10 to the 100th power (1 followed by 100 zeros). Which is larger than the number of elementary particles in the universe, 10 to the 80th power.
The meaning behind the name suits the search engine, considering the endless results it can produce when a search is entered.
According to fellow student David Koller, the name was a actually a typo.
“Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as ‘Google.com’ which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name Google.com” Koller explains.
The domain name was registered on September 15, 1997.
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