Google’s name mistake changed everything for Google
Google started as a college research project in 1996 by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Originally, the pair built a search engine named BackRub. Unlike early search engines that looked only at words on a page, BackRub analyzed how websites linked to one another. The partners realized that websites with the most links from other high-quality pages were the most useful.
Google’s Name Mistake
They soon renamed the project Google, a play on the mathematical term “googol” (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). The name represented their goal to organize a nearly infinite amount of information on the internet.
In September 1998, Google officially incorporated as a company.
Backed by a $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the young engineers moved out of their college dorm rooms and rented a small garage in Menlo Park, California, to serve as their first office.
From those humble beginnings, their smart algorithm quickly outpaced all competition to become the world’s most dominant search engine.
Larry Pages Served as the founding CEO during Google’s official incorporation in September 1998.
Operating out of a California garage, his primary focus was raw engineering, which led to the rollout of the groundbreaking PageRank algorithm. Instead of just counting keywords, this update analyzed website backlinks to deliver vastly superior search accuracy than its competitors.
Eric Schmidt took over as CEO to bring “adult supervision” and professional business structure to the startup.
Under his executive leadership, Google scaled its infrastructure to handle billions of pages and rapidly expanded Google AdWords [tech, 2000]. This update turned the highly accurate search engine into a global, multi-billion-dollar advertising powerhouse.
Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO as Google restructured into its parent company, Alphabet Inc. Pichai’s early tenure was defined by shifting Google toward an “AI-first” future.
He oversaw the launch of RankBrain, Google’s first major machine-learning algorithm update built to understand complex, conversational search queries, alongside Mobilegeddon, which forced the web to optimize for smartphones.
Interesting story behind the Name “GOOGLE”
The name Google ties a number famous for its 100 zeros directly to a simple typing mistake. Larry Page and his team wanted to name their search engine “googol”—a math term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros—to show how many web pages they planned to organize, but a keyboard typo during a domain search accidentally created Google instead
