Why Is Google Called Google?

But the story is also very “early internet”: brainstorming, checking domain availability, and a spelling that stuck because it was short, pronounceable, and brand-friendly.

From “BackRub” to a Name the World Could Remember

Before it became Google, the project had a very different name: BackRub. It referred to analysing “back links” (what we now call backlinks) to estimate a page’s importance—an early step toward ranking web pages based on relationships between them, not just keywords.

As the project evolved at Stanford in the mid-1990s, Page and Brin needed something bigger than an internal nickname. A strong global name has to be easy to say, easy to type, and hard to forget—across many languages.

What Exactly Is a “Googol”?

A googol is 10¹⁰⁰—a number so large it’s mainly used to illustrate scale rather than in everyday calculations. The term is widely credited to mathematician Edward Kasner, whose young nephew Milton Sirotta allegedly suggested the playful name for an “unimaginably big” number.

The idea wasn’t that a search engine would literally index a googol pages. It was that the web felt effectively limitless—and the name should reflect the ambition to organise a universe of information.

So Why “Google,” Not “Googol”?

According to the most cited origin accounts, the “googol” concept came up during naming discussions, and google.com emerged as the practical version that was written down and adopted. In other words: the catchy, brand-ready spelling won.

The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, which is why that date appears in many “Google origin” timelines. Not long after, the company identity and the search engine’s public presence accelerated.

The Deeper Meaning: A Mission Hidden in Plain Sight

“Google” works as an international brand because it’s short, distinctive, and easy to pronounce in many languages. More importantly, it communicates scale and confidence: the promise to organise vast amounts of information and make it useful.

That’s why the name has aged well. It doesn’t describe a feature. It describes an ambition.

A Very Short Timeline

• 1996: Stanford-era research and early crawler work begins; the project is known as “BackRub.”
• September 15, 1997: google.com is registered.
• 1998: Google Inc. is formed and the search engine’s public identity takes off.
• 2000s: Ads become central to the business model; “google” spreads as a verb in everyday language.
• 2015: Alphabet becomes the parent company structure, with Google as its largest subsidiary.

How “Google” Became a Verb (and Why That’s Tricky)

When a product dominates a category, people often use the brand name as shorthand for the activity. In English, “I’ll google it” became a common way to say “I’ll search the web.” That usage was mainstream enough that major dictionaries added the verb form in the mid-2000s.

There’s a tension here, though: Google is a trademark, and companies typically dislike their brand becoming a generic term, because it can weaken the brand’s legal distinctiveness over time.