All You Need To Know About The Origins Of Google's Classic Brand Name On Its 22nd Birthday

The search engine giant, Google, which turned 22 on Sunday commemorated its birth anniversary with an interesting animated doodle.

Google

Usually, the tech giant comes up with snippets marking important events and birthdays of eminent personalities as a doodle on its home page. This time, Google shared a special birthday doodle that showed a video call in progress. The call was being made between the letter G and the rest of the letters in the name of the company- Google.

The homepage displayed a smiling animated 'G', wearing a birthday hat, sitting in front of a laptop surrounded with a cake and presents by its side. The laptop screen showed 'G'video calling its friends, that is the remaining letters 'oogle' in four separate windows, in full celebratory mood.

The doodle, clearly, had been designed keeping in mind the current situation due to the coronavirus pandemic, where people have been forced to stay indoors and depend on technology to communicate.

The official Google Doodle page, however, shared the history of Google founders and how they trace their roots back to the sunny campus of Stanford University. One of the most popular and user-friendly search engine, Google was founded as a research project in September 1998. The technology company was a brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at the Stanford University in California.

Google

The pair decided to come up with a way that helps people get more information. ¡°They set out to improve the way people interacted with the wealth of information on the World Wide Web. In 1998, Google was born, and the rest is history,¡± the company said.

Apart from this, the company also shared a story regarding its name. The world-famous name has been played on a mathematical term that was introduced around the year 1920. A century ago (1920), an American mathematician Edward Kasner was walking in the woods of New Jersey. While taking a stroll Kasner had asked his nephew Milton Sirotta to help him choose a name. The name was for a mind-boggling number (at that time)- a 1 followed by 100 zeros. To this, Milton replied, ¡°A googol.¡± Since then, the term gained visibility and the word spread. After twenty years, in 1940, Kasner co-authored a book called ¡°Mathematics and the Imagination,¡± and included the term, Googol.

Therefore, the term ¡®Google¡¯ has been derived from the mathematical term "googol", a number equivalent to 10 raised to the power of 100 and was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb in 2006. So if you'd like to learn more about how big a googol really is, just Google it!