COLUMN // HISTORY
Google Is a Misspelled Word
On the origins of the world’s most widely used search engine.
Written by Lee S. Langston
The internet is a global network of interconnected computers that makes information available, while the World Wide Web is a vast, largely unorganized collection of information and resources that’s accessed via the internet.
A search engine is a computer program that simplifies the process of quickly finding specific online information contained in the Internet’s billions of web pages. Google is the internet’s leading search engine, providing quick answers and detailed research. Currently, Google gets about 8.5 billion searches every day. It holds more than 90 percent of the global market share for search engines.
Photo: Getty
The verb “googling” refers to the act of using the Google search engine to find information on the internet. It has become a common term for searching online, regardless of the search engine used.
Google came about in Stanford University’s Computer Science Department in the 1990s.
I did my graduate work at Stanford’s campus in northern California, receiving my Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1964. Stanford’s School of Engineering is currently celebrating its 100th year and recently sent me a book commemorating the anniversary. Titled, Stanford Engineering…A Century of Discovery, Innovation, and Impact, it reminded me that Google came about at Stanford, some years after I left campus.
This centennial volume has the story of Google’s invention and foundation in 1998 by two Stanford computer science graduate students, Midwest-born Larry Page and Moscow-born Sergey Brin. Page and Brin collaborated on an algorithm, known as BackRub, that could trace the web’s network of links backward to learn which pages were linking to any given page. The number and quality of those “backlinks” might indicate the value of the page to which they were all linking.
That seemingly simple hypothesis subsequently laid the foundation for the company. Page and Brin’s original algorithm was expanded and refined to become PageRank, named for both its function and for Page himself.
The original Google logo from 1997. Image: Wikimedia Commons
According to a January 2004 account of Google’s namesake written by David Koller, a computer scientist and researcher at Stanford University:
“From time to time I read or hear stories of the origin of the search engine and company name ‘Google’ that are incorrect, which prompts me to write this brief account, based on my understanding of the genesis of the name. The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.
“In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine ‘BackRub,’ named for its analysis of the web’s ‘back links.’ Larry's office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year.
“Sean and Larry 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,’ 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 domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and 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 (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).”
Thus, Google—both a search engine and an American multination technology company—earned its moniker through the misspelling of the word googol, the fanciful name for ten raised to the hundredth power.
Lee S. Langston is professor emeritus in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
© 2025 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.