The other day, along my travels of the internet highway, I wondered to myself “Where does the name Google come from?“. So I looked and this is what I found.

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Taken from http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/corporate/index.html