The guys who made Google couldn’t spell!

The founders Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, named the company Google instead of Googol as they made a mistake in spelling. But that doesn’t seem to have mattered much.

But what is a googol?.

A googol is a very large number. It is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Go on – count them!

The term was first coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta, the young nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner when he was looking for a name for the number.

A googol has no particular significance in mathematics but it can be useful when comparing with other incredibly large quantities such as the number of possible chess games.

And whilst we are googling around you might like to think about a googleplex.

A googolplex is the number one followed by one googol zeroes.

Now that is a big number.