Google - The $160 billion typo error

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were trying to name their new search engine company. They floated many names, one of them was “BackRub” named for its analysis of the web’s “back links”. Luckily they didn’t name the company as such, which doesn’t sound right compared to Google.

Larry Page was studying at Stanford University and sharing the office in room 360 of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, who came up with this typo.

Larry and Sean were discussing several names for the company and were using a whiteboard, to come up with a good name. Since the search engine involves indexing immense amount of data, Sean suggested the world “Googolplex”, which refers to a large number, 10 powered Googol times.

But Larry didn’t like the word Googolplex, just Googol. They did a search to see whether Googol was registered, but Sean instead of typing “Googol” he typed “Google” and found the domain to be available. Larry liked this new name, within hours later, he and Sergey Brin registered the name “Google.com” and the rest became history.

Lucky for Sean it was a great error to make, a $160 billion worth on the positive side. Sean is not working with Google now, he is working for Microsoft, Google’s archrival.