31 THE SPELLING MISTAKE,
THE BACKRUB AND 100 ZEROS

Here’s a story you can backrub – sorry, Google.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in 1995. By 1996, they had built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual webpages. Their name for the fledgling product was “Backrub”.

On reflection, Brin and Page decided that perhaps Backrub wasn’t such a good name. It was certainly unusual and original, but they wanted something that related in some way to the service they aimed to provide in linking millions of webpages together.

After much consideration, they chose a word for a huge number: a ‘Googol’. A googol is the term for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Brin and Page liked it so much because it truly reflected the scale of their ambition.

It also fitted with what was to become their mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

However, the name was to undergo one further and unexpected change.

One of their first investors was farsighted enough to see the potential in what they wanted to do, but his spelling wasn’t quite as good as his business sense. When he wrote out his cheque, he made it out to “Google”.

Brin and Page liked it and the new name stuck.

And the moral is that not all mistakes produce bad results. Looking back over mistakes you may have made in the past, how can you capitalize on something that went wrong?