Search engine giant Google, which is known for being forgetful about the date of its own birthday, is celebrating its 21st birthday on September 27 this year. Google’s doodlers decided to go retro with a typical desktop we had at our homes 21 years ago.

Starting our 21st birthday by looking at some childhood pictures 😊#GoogleDoodle

➡️ https://t.co/DQfKCk5CLy pic.twitter.com/fyhh9joa51

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— Google India (@GoogleIndia) September 26, 2019

But do you ever wonder what is “google”, anyway? It’s just a very very large number. That’s a one, followed by a hundred zeroes, which is what you get if you multiply ten times ten and keep multiplying by ten until you’ve done it a hundred times. In scientific notation, the mathematical shorthand for dealing with staggeringly large numbers, a googol is written 10 to the power 100. To give you a sense of how big a googol is, it’s about 20 orders of magnitude bigger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe, which is “only” 10 to the power 80. It’s also about the lifespan of a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of our galaxy.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin borrowed the term for their company in 1998, to suggest the unfathomably large number of results their new search engine could provide. Larry and Sergey were obviously exaggerating a bit, and they also took a bit of poetic license with the spelling.

And if you are among the one who thinks Google’s name sounded like a nonsense word, probably made up by a small child, you are right.

Then 9 old Milton Sirotta (1911-1981), whose mathematician uncle Edward Kasner asked him to pin a name on the enormous number for a book Kasner was working on Mathematics and the Imagination, published in 1940. Other names for googol include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale.

Kasner died in 1955, and his nephew Sirotta died in 1981, 17 years too early to see the word he had invented become the name of a California startup that grew into the 17th largest company in the world (under the umbrella of Alphabet).

As per reports, Kasner’s great-niece told the Baltimore Sun in 2004 that she wasn’t sure what her uncle would think about Google’s use of the word. “Obviously it’s only brought attention to the name; it hasn’t brought attention to his work, so I’m not quite certain what he’d think,” she said. “They’re not using the concepts, but just capitalizing on the name.” She added that she had written to the company in 1998 to introduce herself and the family, but received no response.

Fun Fact

A googol is the large number 10 to the power 100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes:

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.

(With input from agencies)