What is Google?

As most of us recognize, Google is the most popular search engine available. People include it in regular speech: "I'll google for the address of the store...", "I googled the person who applied for the job..."

Ever wonder where the name "Google" came from? The word is a play on the word, "googol". A googol is equivalent to a 1 followed by 100 zeros. That's a huge number! It stands for the ever increasing amount of information that is available on the internet.

The word, "googol" was first introduced by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of American mathematician, Edward Kasner. It was made popular through the launch of the book "Mathematics and the Imagination".

The company, Google was founded in 1995 by two computer science graduates from Stanford University. Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought some inexpensive computer equipment, set it up in a dorm room and began Google's first data center.