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0 pointsexcitom4y ago0 comments

Frankly that was my reaction when I first heard of "google".

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4 comments · 1 top-level

mikepurvis4y ago· 3 in thread

At least to most normal people "google" would have sounded like a silly, made up word. Or like, the most association it might have had would be to something like googley eyes.

DuckDuckGo has the disadvantage of not only sounding silly, but also being composed of silly-sounding real words. And not having a secret geeky meaning that people find out about and then feel like they're part of an elite club.

Zenbit_UX4y ago

This comment is so unrelatable to me, every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

It was, simply put, the biggest named number anyone knew and was frequently used as such in arguments... e.g. I watched that movie 1000 times! Oh ya? Well I watched it a google times.

post_from_work4y ago

>>>every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

Same here, as someone who was in high school in the late 90s and switched from AskJeeves/Yahoo/Altavista to Google around ~2000, part of the appeal was "Somebody named a search engine after the biggest number meme we know? AND it's fast? AND it gives good results? Lemme check this out..."

Terretta4y ago

googol = 10^100

// did that get auto-corrected? if so, ironic, as it’s said "Google" was an accidental misspelling of "googol" by Sean Anderson back in ‘97…

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

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