After 27 years, not all people know what ‘Google’ means
People are only just realizing what Google really means.
Internet users are only now realizing what Google is, 27 years after it was created. The popular search engine known for transforming the internet and is currently seeing increased traffic by billions of people using it worldwide since its creation in 1998.
Google has grown dramatically over the past 27 years and now owns such huge portals as Gmail, YouTube, and more. The company is also developing its own smartphone, owns the Pixel brand, and acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion.
A recent post on Quora asking whether Google is an acronym revealed that the word is actually a misspelling of “Googol”. Googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was chosen to reflect the mission of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, in most cases free.
The word “Googol” was invented by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta in 1920. Sirott may have been inspired by the comic book character Barney Google. The boy was the nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, who frequently mentioned Googol in his book “Mathematics and the Imagination”.
Larry Page revealed that the name came about when he and Sergey Brin were considering a name for their search engine. However, the person who suggested the name accidentally spelled it as “Google,” and they stuck with it.
Page and Brin’s partnership began shortly after meeting at Stanford University in 1995. The pair began working in their dorm rooms to create a search engine that would use links to determine the importance of web pages. Initially calling it “Backrub,” Page and Brin changed the name to Google.
Google quickly attracted the attention of investors, and what turned into a project became a reality after Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim invested $100,000.
The company was also funded by entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos and Ram Shriram, and by 1998, Google had invested more than $300,000.
People Using Google Stats (Top Picks)
- There are approximately 16.4 billion searches on Google every day;
- Google processes 189,815 searches per second;
- Google drives the highest percentage of search traffic in Nigeria, at 98.69%;
- The United States accounts for 20.98% of all Google traffic;
- Google’s global market share among search engines is 89.57%;
- The US Google site gets 101.3 billion visits each month, of which 5.8 billion are unique visitors.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked intermittently at Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., until they stepped down from all positions in 2019.
By September 2025, Alphabet Inc. was valued at more than $3 trillion, a milestone reached after a favorable antitrust ruling and a significant jump in its stock price, making it the fourth company to reach that size of market capitalization.
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