Happy Birthday Google: Search giant Google is turning 27 today, September 27, in a major milestone. An idea that was birthed at a tiny garage in Menlo Park is now the most popular search engine globally, used by billions of people worldwide.

Almost everyone with internet access uses Google everyday. In fact, it’s likely that you landed upon this article using Google. But have you ever wondered what ‘Google’ really means?

What does ‘Google’ mean?

Google is really a clever wordplay on the term ‘Googol’ — a mathematical term that refers to 1 followed by 100 zeros or 10 raised to the power of 100.

Googol was coined by by Milton Sirotta, mathematician Edward Kasner’s nephew.

Therefore, Google intends to reflect Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s ambition with their search engine, to show vast amount of information.

The story behind naming Google

Google was not always called Google. In fact, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, had the idea to launch a search engine after identifying its potential, the name Google was not even on their mind.

Google was initially named ‘BackRub’.

However, in 1997, things changed when the core team of the company began to brainstorm ideas to find a new name for BackRub. They wanted to rename the search engine to something that would be reflective of the enormous volume of answers it would possess.

The team came up with the name ‘Googolplex’, a number that’s of a nearly incomprehensible size — ‘1 followed by a Googol of zeros’. However, the core team preferred the shorter term ‘Googol’.

Work to register Googol as a website started when Sean Anderson, another Stanford graduate student who was part of the naming team, did an internet search to see whether it was available.

However, he misspelled the word as ‘Google’, which was an available domain name. Larry Page liked the name, and google.com was registered as a website within a few hours.

Therefore, in essence, Google is an incorrectly spelled version of a mathematical term, and has created tsunamis over the years.

Everything you need to know about Google

Google was launched by two Stanford PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. The company’s official incorporation date is September 4, 1998.

However, Google celebrates its birthday on September 27 to commemorate its internal milestones.

What started as a search engine from a garage is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a holding company established in 2015.

Sundar Pichai is now the CEO of Google and Alphabet, which is a publicly traded company, but Brin and Page continue to remain key insiders and board members and reserves voting controls.