Googly!

Googly!

Almost everyone knows the popular search engine Google. But many don't know the little story behind how the name actually came up. Actually there is this mathematical number 'googol' which means a very big number 10¹⁰⁰, that is digit 1 followed by 100 zeros. Just like thousand is a number with digit 1 followed by 3 zeros, that is 1000, the googol is a digit 1 followed by 100 zeros. Obviously this is a huge number. The founders of the now search engine Google wanted to make a search site that would index huge number of websites, like the number googol itself. But the problem was they thought that the spelling of that number was 'g o o g l e' and not 'g o o g o l'. Hence they registered the website by the name www.google.com and were even surprised to know that such website name doesn't exist already.

But the website by the actual googol name already existed under www.googol.com. Currently this domain has expired and you may just find rubbish page in the site. But the old versions of the pages are still available under the Internet Achieve Wayback Machine.

Here's what the website www.googol.com looked like in the year 2002.

And here is what the search engine www.google.com looked like in its early days in 1998.

There also exists a term called 'googly' in the game of cricket. This term is used for a sort of a "trick ball". It is a way to trick in which the opponent thinks that the ball is coming in one direction but the ball actually moves in another direction. The Google and googol reminds me of the googly. Also its safer to know that in the world of internet, there are lots of fake sites that may mislead a user as the real site. Such as the sites you get when you misspell the domain names.

By the way you can track the early versions of many sites in the Internet Achieve site. Or may be add yours too.