What is the secret behind Google's name?

Google is one of the most popular search engines on earth, but many people are just discovering how it got its unusual name.

Google's etymology has come to light via a resurfaced post on Quora, where a user asked: “Is Google an acronym?” The question prompted various theories about the name origins of the company, founded by computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 while they were PhD students at Stanford University.

Answering to the query, some people said that Google stands for the “Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth.” However, the answer is factually incorrect. Some others pointed out that the name is not an acronym. They explained that Google was a play on the word “Googol.”

It should be mentioned here that a googol is a mathematical term which means 1 followed by 100 zeroes — a nearly unimaginable number.

Interestingly, this term was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, who mentioned it in his 1940 book "Mathematics and the Imagination." Sirotta thought that such a silly number deserved an equally silly name.

One of the suggested names for the company was "Googol" presented before Larry Page and his team. When Page checked the domain's availability for Googol, a friend mistakenly spelt it as “Google.” Page liked the misspelling. This is how Google was born.