Googol

A googol is a unit of measurement. It is equal to ten duotrigintillion (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) of something. The number of the same name is also known as ten thousand sexdecillion.

A 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, first used the word "googol". Sirotta made this word in 1937, for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.He may have been inspired by the comic strip  character Barney Google.

The company Google was named after the number "googol".  Its creators originally called it BackRub because it used backlinks to tell how important each page was. Someone suggested "googolplex". They shortened it to "googol" and then spelled the word wrong when looking for a domain name that was not yet taken.

Related pages 
 Graham's number 
 Googolplex, which is 10googol

References

Category:Numbers

Googol vs Google name theories

Google was meant to be named Googol but they misspelled it and they just kept it.

Or, the misspelling may have been intentional thanks to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

That's in the article already, dumdum.