It started with a misspelling. According to David Vise, in his book The Google Story, the company’s founders had been brainstorming about possible names for days and were out of ideas. Then one sketched the word Googleplex on the whiteboard.

A mathematical term meaning 1 followed by 101 zeroes, it caught the deep technological intent of the company. Shortened to Google, it also struck them as playful and in keeping with the new (at the time) spirit of the internet, no doubt by analogy to Yahoo – a result of the double “o” – and the seemingly senseless nature of the word hiding an arcane meaning. It was only the next day that someone passing the whiteboard pointed out that it should have been spelt Googol.