Word Story Founded in 1998, the Web site Google.com has become such an institution that in its short existence, it has changed not only the way we process the endless data found on the information superhighway, but also the way we think and talk about the Internet.
The term
google itself is a creative spelling of
googol, a number equal to 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially, an unfathomable number.
Googol was coined in the 1930s and is attributed to the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner.
Soon after Google was created, the trademarked company name became a popular verb. People were “googling” all sorts of information, including their own names. When users
google themselves, unless their names are absurdly rare, they may find their “googlegangers” (a portmanteau word combining “google” and “doppelgänger”), or their namesakes, listed in the Google search results.
A whole new industry has sprung up around Google, including the new field of
search-engine optimization, or SEO, which works to boost the ranking of a name or term in Google and other search-engine results. In 2005, the newly-minted term
Google bomb became popular, to describe the intentional skewing of Google search results by creating links to misleading Web pages. Whether we like it or not, we now live in a Google-centric world.