Google

Maybe if you’ve been living in a cave, or as a goatherd in deepest Kazakhstan you won’t have heard of Google. Not an unusual word these days, but an interesting story. Google is now a verb as well as a trade name – it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary this year – to google is to search the Internet for information, a generic term I’m sure the other major search engines are not happy with.

The name/word itself originated from a misspelling of googol, a mathematical term. A googol is one followed by a hundred zeros, or 10¹⁰⁰. It was first used by an American mathematician, Edward Kasner in 1920, following a suggestion made by his young nephew. If you need an idea of how big a number it is, bear in mind that the number of atoms in the observable universe only hits around 10⁸⁰!

The co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were searching for a name for their ranking system which gave higher scores to sites which had a lot of other sites linking to them (called backlinks). The original name they came up with was “BackRub” – how different the language of web searching could have been today. Realising it was not a very cool name, they eventually pulled “google” from the top of a list of very large numbers. It was later pointed out to them that it had been misspelled, but they liked the look of the name and stuck with it. They founded their company with this name and the corporate mission statement “don’t be evil”. Whether they are evil or not is a matter of some discussion among the Internet cognoscenti, but their philanthropic division, google.org aims to tackle global issues such as climate change, renewable energy and global health. This would certainly make them OK in my book – especially as the founders have pledged a billion dollars to the cause.

An interesting game to play if work gets a bit dull is Googlewhack. Try to use Google to find two words which only produce a single result in the search engine. You may only use dictionary words and no quotes (which group the words into a phrase in Google’s search). It’s amazingly tricky. I tried pontefract cushion (12,200 hits), dribbling piston (72,800 hits), ambivalent corpuscle (810 hits), encroaching wildebeest (910 hits) and geothermal underpants ( a mind-boggling 21,700 hits!). Post your best scores here – try to beat my miserable 810.

If you’re really really bored, try using the search interface in Klingon…

P.S. – no picture today, as I don’t want to test their “don’t be evil” motto by infringing their copyright!