The name is so embedded in our lexicon that it’s now a verb as well as a noun but do you actually have any idea where the word Google comes from?
Welll, to learn that, we have to go way back to 1995 when Google creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met.
According to the Google website: “By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership.
“Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.”
While Backrub is, uh, endearing, I guess, the name unsurprisingly did not stick.
Where the name Google came from
So, quite fittingly for two tech nerds, the name actually comes from a mathematical expression.
It’s a play on the word ‘Googol’.
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. It is an unimaginably huge number that surpasses the total number of particles in the observable universe.
Incredible.
Google state: ”[The name] aptly reflected Larry and Sergey’s mission ’to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Which, as we all know, truly paid off!
Google officially also became a verb in 2006 when it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary and to the eleventh edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July 2006.
However, the first use of the word Google as a verb was actually in TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
On October 15, 2002, in the fourth episode of the show’s final season, the character Willow turns to the slayer and asks, “Have you googled her yet?”, marking the beginning of all of us casually using the name as a verb.
Wild.