Am I the last to get this? My wife says it’s obvious. What is Google, the search engine, named after?
No, a Google is not the Norwegian word for “big search.” (I don’t think it is anyway.) Nor is it named after a famous 19th C. Russian writer. (That’s Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls. That’s a pretty creepy connection there: are a googol of dead souls? The answer is no, as only about 106 billion people/hominids have been born up till 2002.)*
It is a googol, a really large yet finite number, equal to 10 to the 100th power. (Googolplex, the theatre I named in an earlier blog is a number as well, 10 to the googoleth power. I took this from The Simpsons as that is the name of Homer’s local multiplex theatre.)
A googol is very big, but relatively easy to handle. 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
A googolplex, however, is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.
My American Heritage College Dictionary claims both googol and googolplex were coined by then nine-year old Milton Sirotta, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. “Googol” was coined in 1938, so while there have been googols around for billions and billions of years as Carl Sagan would say, they have only been named for less than 70 years.
The number of web pages indexed by Google is about 8 x 10 to the 9th power or 8 billion pages, so they have a way a long way to go before they reach their namesake.
According to webmasterworld.com, googol.com was already registered by April, 1995 when Google started.
Frank Pilhofer has a web page that offers a program that will print a googolplex. Eventually.
This page has been honored with both a “top 5%” of the net award — this is from 1995, about the time Google was searching for a name — and one of the most useless pages on the net. It has a lot of large number discussion all in one place.
Mr. Pilhofer points out that a googolplex is “the largest number with a common name.”
For more on very large numbers that you ever wanted to know, see Large Numbers, a googol-sized website.
Here’s the history of Google search engine.