What actually is a Google?

What does the name of the most popular search engine on the web actually mean?

 

The name is actually a misspelling of the word googol. A googol is the mathematical term for the number:
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
which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes and as you can see is a very large number.
Though google has now become a noun in its own right the name remembers the company's academic roots at Stanford university.

Source: The Google Story, David A Vise