A googol is a real number. It's 1 followed by 100 zeros, a quantity so incomprehensibly large that it exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe by a margin that makes the word "exceed" feel inadequate. The American mathematician Edward Kasner coined the term in 1920, borrowing it from his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, who made it up on the spot when his uncle asked him to think of a name for a very big number.
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students at Stanford working on a research project called "BackRub" — a search engine that analyzed the web by tracking which pages linked to which other pages. When it came time to rename the project, someone in the room suggested "googol" to convey the idea that the engine was dealing with an almost inconceivable amount of information.
Someone checked whether googol.com was available. It wasn't. Then someone — accounts differ on exactly who — checked google.com instead. It was available. The name Google — a misspelling of googol — was registered on September 15, 1997.
The Accidental Name That Became Its Own Word
What happened next is one of the stranger episodes in trademark history. Google became so dominant as a search engine that people started using the brand name as a verb. "Just google it." This usage spread so quickly and became so embedded in everyday language that Merriam-Webster added "google" as a lowercase verb to its dictionary in 2006 — nine years after the domain was registered.
This created a problem. Under trademark law, if a brand name becomes the generic term for an entire category of goods or services, it can lose trademark protection entirely. The process is called "genericide," and it has claimed famous marks before: "aspirin" was once a Bayer trademark. "Escalator" belonged to Otis. "Zipper" was a B.F. Goodrich brand. When consumers start using a brand name to refer to the product rather than the brand, the courts sometimes conclude the mark has lost its distinctiveness.
Google's legal response: Google has actively fought to prevent "google" from becoming a generic verb. The company has sent letters to media organizations asking them to use "google" only when referring to Google's own search engine, not as a generic synonym for web searching. In 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Google's favor, finding that the mark had not become generic despite widespread verb usage. The court's reasoning: consumers still associate "Google" with a specific company, not just with searching in general.
What the Typo Built
It's worth pausing on what that misspelling eventually became. The trademark "Google" — misspelled, accidentally available, registered almost as an afterthought — is today one of the most valuable marks ever registered. Brand valuation estimates consistently place it among the top five most valuable brands in the world, worth hundreds of billions of dollars by various methodologies.
The name works for reasons that have nothing to do with the math behind it. "Googol" is abstract and slightly difficult to say. "Google" is easy. It has a hard G at both ends that gives it momentum. It sounds like a verb — which, it turned out, was exactly what would happen to it. You don't googol something. You google it. The typo, accidentally, produced a better brand name than the intended word would have been.
The Name Before the Name
"BackRub" — the original name of Google's search engine — is worth a moment of appreciation on its own. The name described the technical mechanism accurately: the system worked by analyzing backlinks. But "backrub" as a brand name for a global information utility carries a particular energy that makes "Google" look inspired by comparison, misspelling and all.
There's a version of this story where the typo gets caught, googol.com gets acquired, and the company launches with the correct spelling. In that version, "to googol something" never becomes a verb because it doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. The ninth-circuit case never happens. The dictionary entry reads differently, or not at all.
Probably the company does just fine anyway. But the name we'd be saying is slightly worse, and the story is considerably less interesting. Sometimes a typo is just a typo. And sometimes it becomes the name of the company that organizes the world's information.