Chucking a googly

I wrote a column a few months back in which I lauded Google, the world’s biggest search engine, for the fact that it had managed to make its brand generic.

That is, the verb ‘to google’ has become synonymous with searching the Internet for the various scraps of ephemera with which it is littered. I saw this as a good thing.

Google, apparently, doesn’t. The company that saw the wisdom in paying billions of dollars for YouTube apparently can’t see the value in mindshare branding. Go figure.

Google has been asking people not to refer to ‘googling’ subjects on the Internet, as the company fears that will make the term generic and therefore indefensible as a trademark. It wants to own the word ‘google’ all for itself. Let’s just get some perspective here. The word ‘google’ was used for a considerable period of time as an alternative form of the word ‘goggle’.

In the early years of the 20th century it was co-opted by the game of cricket when the word ‘googly’ was invented to describe a type of delivery bowled by a spin bowler.

The verb ‘to google’ was as early as 1907 applied to the act of delivering a googly. (I looked that up in the Oxford English Dictionary – I didn’t google it.)

This is not the word that Google’s founders adopted (in fact, being American, they may not have known of its cricket usage). They named their invention after a variant spelling of the word ‘googol’, which was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, who wanted a name for a really big number. The number looks like this:
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.

That’s 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The number has no application or significance in mathematics or any other field (this is not because of its size – there are larger numbers that are useful).

Google’s founders wanted their thing to be synonymous with a vast amount of information, when in fact it should be synonymous with incredibly useless information. Hey, what do you know!

Normally, large numbers are named in multiples of 1000. That is, a ‘million’ is 1000x1000 (‘mille’ being Latin for 1000), a ‘billion’ is 1000x1000x1000, a ‘trillion’ 1000x1000x1000x1000, a ‘quadrillion’ 1000x1000x1000x1000x1000 and so on. A 1 followed by 99 zeroes is a ‘duotrigintillion’.

Thus, 1 followed by 100 zeroes is 10 duotrigintillion. Kasner, if he were any kind of mathematician, should have known that and not asked a nine year old to give a name to a number that already had one.

(Then again, would he have been remembered for anything else – he might be the canny one, old Kas.)

In short, Google’s founders can hardly claim to have invented the word ‘google’, and they can hardly stop people using it generically. However, I will comply with their request. From now on, I shan’t google things on the Web. I’ll tenduotrigintillion them. Catchy. q

Matthew JC Powell can’t count that high. Aid his numeracy on mjcp@optusnet.com.au.

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