I’m sure that everyone has used Google before be it to do school work or find extra information. But does anyone know the story behind the name? Ever wondered where the name ‘Google’ came from? If your answer is yes, then your curiosity will be sated right now by reading this article! From time to time, I have read many stories of the origin of the search engine or company Google and found many of them inaccurate. This prompted me to write a brief account on the origin of the name. The founders of Google were Larry Page and Sergey Brin who were graduates of Stanford University.

In the year 1996, they called their initial search engine ‘BackRub’, named for its analysis of the web’s back links. Larry and Sergey’s office was in room 360 which he shared with several other graduate students including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, they discussed a number of possible new manes for the rapidly improving search engine. Sean held a brainstorming session one day in September. He was in the office using a whiteboard trying to think of a suitable name, something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data.

He suggested the word ‘googolplex’ to which Larry responded with the shortened form ‘googol’ which meant the number one followed by a hundred zeroes. Sean was seated at his computer terminal so he executed a search on the Internet name registry to see if the name was still available. Sean was not an infallible speller and in his excitement, he made a mistake of searching for the name ‘google’ which he found to be available. Larry liked the name and within hours, he took the step of registering the name ‘google.com’ for himself and Sergey.