When we were kids, "google" was literally just the largest number we could think of. So when we played hide n' seek we'd have to count to google, actually it is spelled "googol" but we honestly didn't know this.

The counting went kind of like this:

"One, two, three.... Balla balla bladda... A Google! I'm coming to get you!"

A google is, literally, a 1 with a hundred zeroes behind it. It looks like this.

If you were to actually count up to that number it would take you, according to these calculations, approximately 1.584 * 10^90 centuries to do it. And that's even if you counted constantly and consistently without sleeping, eating or drinking!

It's a big damn number.

Do most people today even know that?

Even if they do, I'm sure that most people today first and foremost think of the search-engine-based company rather than the actual noun that the word represents.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of the world's most used search engine, knew that. Being Stanford PhD candidates it is almost like a prerequisite. They wanted to convey the amount of results that you could get from their algorithm... 10^100 to be exact. But it's more like the Chinese use the character 万 (wan - 10,000). It's more to denote something as innumerable than it is to refer to a specific number.

22 years ago on September 15, 1997 when Brin and Page went to register a domain name to host their project, they tried to get the domain name for their favorite number - googol.com - but it was already taken. So they got google.com instead.

And that, in its own small way, has changed the world forever.

What is remarkable to me is that back in the 80s and most of the 90s, "google" was just a number that kids thought, if we counted up successively from 1, we would never be able to reach in a lifetime, maybe two. (We had no idea how long it would actually take!)

Words can utterly and completely change their entire meaning, and all of their associations, within the space of a generation or two.

What once was simply a 1 with a 100 zeroes behind it became simultaneously 1) a proper noun referring to one of the largest companies in the world and 2) a verb that is almost universally understood to mean "to look up something on the internet."

Crazy.

---

_{Posted via Marlians.com}