People are just realizing Google is spelled wrong – and the brain-bending hidden meaning behind name

GOOGLE might be a world-famous brand – but it’s technically spelled wrong.

It’s a brilliant piece of trivia that you’ll be able to impress (or more likely annoy) people with for years to come.

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Yes, Google should actually be spelled “googol”, and for a very good reason.

Google may sound like a made up word, and in some ways it is.

But it’s inspired by the real mathematical term googol.

This is a weird to describe an enormous number: a one followed by 100 zeroes.

And there’s an even bigger term called googolplox, which is a one followed by a googol of zeroes.

So what does that have to do with Google?

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were first creating their search engine at Stanford University back in 1996, it was named BackRub.

This was a reference to backlinks – sites pointing to a webpage – which the search engine would use to measure the authority of a website.

According to Stanford University’s David Koller, Larry was coming up with alternative name ideas with other graduate students – including Sean Anderson.

Sean reportedly suggested the word googolplex, as a reference to the search engine indexing enormous amounts of data.

Larry reportedly responded with googol and Sean check to see if the internet domain name was available.

Sean is said to have mistaken searched for google.com, which was available.

“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,” Koller writes.

“Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey.”

Ultimately the name Google has caught on, so the misspelling doesn’t really matter.

And the word has since become far more famous than its mathematical inspiration.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk