Google and Googleplex, googol and googolplex

The internet search engine Google has come a long way since its creation by Stanford University computer science graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin only 15 years ago (1996). It is now thought to be the most powerful brand in the world and Google.com is the internet’s most visited site.

Google runs more than a million servers in data centres around the world. Every day it processes more than a billion search requests and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data.

Page and Brin originally named their search engine BackRub because it checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. In 1997 they renamed it Google — a play on mathematical term “googol” used for the number 10¹⁰⁰.

The new name was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle. But even Google does not come close to handling that much information. A googol is larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. It was created by the American mathematician Edward Kasner to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity.

The name googol was supposedly coined by Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew in 1938, when asked to suggest a name for a huge number. Other names for googol include 10 duotrigintillion on the short scale (used by the US and modern British), 10,000 sexdecillion on the long scale (traditional British), or 10 sexdecillard on the Peletier long (traditional European) scale.

A googolplex is an even larger number still, being 10 raised to the power of one googol. With a googol number of zeros in its decimal representation, a googolplex has more digits than there are atoms in the universe, so that, even with all the matter in the universe at one’s disposal, it would be impossible to write down the decimal representation of this number. Google’s California headquarters has been nicknamed the Googleplex.

The history of the famous search engine could have been very different had it not been for one of the biggest missed business opportunities in history.

In 1999, while still graduate students, Brin and Page decided that their brainchild was taking up too much of their time and offered to sell it to the chief executive officer of Excite, George Bell, for $1m. He rejected their offer and must have kicked himself repeatedly ever since, as the company’s annual profits had risen to more than $6.5bn by 2009.