Google Meaning: What Does Google Mean? (Googol, 1 Followed by 100 Zeros)

Google meaning: what does the name Google mean, and where did the name come from? Google’s name comes from googol, the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. The founders chose it to reflect their mission to organise the huge amount of information on the web, and a famous spelling mistake gave us “Google” instead. Here’s the full story of the Google meaning, what a googol is, and how Google became a verb.

Quick answer: Google is a play on googol, the number 10¹⁰⁰ (1 followed by 100 zeros). It stands for the vast amount of information Google wanted to organise. “Google” isn’t an acronym, so it doesn’t stand for anything else.

Googol meaning: 1 followed by 100 zeros

A googol is 10¹⁰⁰, written out as:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Yes, that’s 100 zeros. The name was coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner asked his nephews to suggest a name for a huge number, and Milton came up with “googol”. Kasner popularised it in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination, written with James Newman.

A googol is larger than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe, which is around 10⁸⁰. An even bigger number, the googolplex, is 10 to the power of a googol. Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, the Googleplex, is named after it.

Google meaning: how Google got its name

Larry Page and Sergey Brin started their search engine at Stanford University in 1996 under the name BackRub, because it analysed backlinks to rank pages. In 1997 they wanted a name that showed the scale of what they were indexing, and googol was suggested.

According to the popular story, when fellow student Sean Anderson checked whether the domain was available, he typed google.com instead of googol.com. Page liked the misspelling, and the domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997. Google Inc. was founded in September 1998. Google’s own Our Story page tells more of its history.

Google’s mission

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The googol name reflects that goal of handling a seemingly infinite amount of information. Since 2015, Google has been part of the parent company Alphabet (named partly as a play on “alpha bet”), as we covered when Google became part of Alphabet.

Google dictionary definition: google as a verb

Google became so popular that its name turned into a verb. In 2006, both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster added “google”, meaning to search for information about someone or something on the internet, usually with the Google search engine. People now say “just google it” rather than “search for it”, whether they’re looking for facts, images or directions.

Fun facts about Google and googol

• Google’s first logo, in 1998, had an exclamation mark, like Yahoo!.
• Gmail launched on 1 April 2004 and many people thought it was an April Fools’ joke.
• “Googol” is often misspelled as “google”, and the reverse happens too.
• Google handles billions of searches every day, still far short of a googol.
• Google’s 404 and error pages once featured a broken robot, and its Easter eggs, like “do a barrel roll”, are still hidden in search.

Frequently asked questions

What does Google stand for?

Google doesn’t stand for anything. It isn’t an acronym. The name comes from googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Who invented the word googol?

Nine-year-old Milton Sirotta came up with it in 1920, and his uncle, mathematician Edward Kasner, made it popular.

Is a googol bigger than infinity?

No. A googol is a finite number, however huge. Infinity isn’t a number at all, and even a googolplex is finite.