Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin believed in Google from the start. Even so, it’s doubtful they envisioned a future where Google would be the number one search engine in the world. And they couldn’t have predicted the phrase “Google it!” would become synonymous with “Look it up!”

On September 7, 1998, the search engine company Google officially became Google Incorporated. Founded by Larry Page and his business partner, Sergey Brin, while graduate students at Stanford University, Google was a joint vision the pair made a reality.

What started in Larry Page’s California dorm room became a worldwide success story in a remarkably short amount of time. It’s a success story that keeps on growing.

A Name of Numbers

Google’s name is the result of an innocent misspelling. While still at Stanford, a fellow graduate student suggested the name “Googleplex”—which is spelled “googolplex.” It is 10 raised to the power googol—which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Larry Page suggested shortening it to Google. A quick check revealed that it was still available as a domain name, so he and Sergey Brin registered the name and scrawled it on a whiteboard in the office: google.com. The next morning, another office mate left a note for them: “You misspelled it. It is supposed to be G-o-o-g-o-l.”

The Verbing of Google

Google’s founders never considered their company’s name anything more than a noun meaning a very large number, representing the enormous size of their indexes. But users of the search engine quickly turned the name into a verb. In 2006, Merriam-Webster defined the word google as a transitive verb meaning “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (a person) on the World Wide Web.” Thomas Pitoniak, the associate editor and composition manager for Merriam-Webster, said, “Google is a unique case. Because they have achieved so much prominence in the world of search, people have been using the word google as a generic verb now.