What’s a Googol?

These days, “Google” is a well-known search engine on the Internet. The name “Google” is a play on the word Googol*, which is the name for a number written as 1 followed by 100 zeros!

It 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

It’s easy to write it out; doesn’t take long at all. But if you had a googol pennies you couldn’t count them all in your lifetime. In fact, you couldn’t count them in a million lifetimes!

Here’s another number: a Googolplex, which is a 1 followed by a googol zeros. That’s so big it can’t even be written out in a million lifetimes!

*”1997: Larry and Sergey decide that [their] search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google — a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”