How Got the Name Google

The tale of Google is in many ways a classic dotcom story. Google began life in January 1996, not as an internet search engine and online advertising corporation as it was destined to become, but as the thesis project of Larry Page, later joined in his endeavors by Sergey Brin, both PhD students at Stanford University, California.
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The story behind the Google name is kind of funny As a couple of math dweebs, Sergey and Larry decided to name the company after a really big number called a “Googol” – which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.  It was a clever attempt to convey the humongous number of websites their new fancy new search engine could search in a flash.

With a great product and a pretty cool name in hand, they went in search of investors. One of the first investors they met loved the idea so much he decided to write a cheque on the spot. But when he wrote out the cheque, he made it out to 'Google'. The name stuck. And the rest, as they say, is name brand history.

Incidentally Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California is known as "the Googleplex", this is a further play on googol' as googolplex means equivalent to ten raised to the power of a googol.

The verb 'Google,' was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 and Google has become integrated into society as a noun in its own right. The practice of searching for information on the web has come to be referred to simply as 'Googling', a tribute to the success and effectiveness of the project's aims.

Trivia:
Googol is a term coined by a then nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. The story goes, Kasner had asked his nephew to invent a name for a very large number - ten to the power of one hundred (the numeral one followed by 100 zeros), and Milton called it a googol. The term was later made popular in Kasner's book, 'Mathematics and the Imagination'.