With all the hype around Google these days – Newsweek, Wired and The New York Times have all written about the uber search engine – I thought it was time for me to dig into the archives and update you folks on Google’s name. This is an article from Forbes.com which I wrote almost four years ago.
Forbes.com: How google is that?:: In case you aren’t familiar with the concept, a googol is a mathematical unit equal to a one followed by 100 zeroes–not an easy number to grasp. The American mathematician Edward Kasner invented the googol in 1938. According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the phrase “googol” was coined when Kasner asked his nephew Milton Sirotta, who was then 8 years old, what name he would give to a really large number, and “googol” was Milton’s response. Google’s name, which is derived from the term googol, reflects the immense amount of information available on the web.