I was thinking about googol and remembered to look it up this time. A mathematician’s 9-year-old nephew thought up the nonsense word for him in 1938. Googol is 10100Â…ten with 100 zeroes. (Why does wikipedia print it with 145 zeroes? Looks like someone got away with it!) The correct name would be ten duotrigintillion, which sounds cooler anyway. So why is the search engine google.com instead of googol.com?
Sean and Larry [google.com founders] were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name – something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” [1 with googol zeroes] and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet registry to see if the newly suggested name was still available for use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey.
Whoever owns googol.com is probably hoping google with give them googol dollars for it.