Fascinating story reveals where Google got its iconic name from

It’s been 22 years for Google. The search engine was created in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and to mark two decades and two years of existence, the company shared an interesting doodle on its homepage.

The special birthday doodle showed a live video call in progress and the call was being made between the letter G and the rest of the letters, ‘oogle’ in the word Google. In the doodle, the two o’s were seen together in one screen giving an impression of being fraternal twins, one of them wearing spectacles. All the other remaining letters were a part of different screens. The complete doodle showed a slice of cake and some presents.

Also read: Google celebrates its 22nd birthday with a special Doodle

The main idea behind the doodle was to show birthdays at the time of social distancing. Since coronavirus has changed our lives and also the way we celebrate birthdays now - particularly through video calls, the doodle was a nod at our real lives.

Besides this reality check, Google also shared a story regarding its name. The company revealed that the partnership between Page and Brin went back a long way and it all started with the Stanford graduates deciding that they needed to come up with something that helps people get more information. Created to help people improve the way they interacted with the “wealth of information” on the World Wide Web, Google was born in 1998.

Also, the now world-famous name was a play on a mathematical term that was introduced around 1920.

In 1920, American mathematician Edward Kasner asked his nephew Milton Sirotta to help him choose a name for a number that was basically 1 followed by a 100 zeroes. Milton replied with - “A googol”.

From then, the term gained visibility and the word spread and after 20 years, Kasner co-authored a book called “Mathematics and the Imagination” and included the term Googol.

‘Google’ went on to officially become a part of the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb after being used as the name of a search engine that would eventually evolve into a search giant.