The word Google is first cited as a proper noun and was the surname of Barney Google a syndicated cartoon character created by Billy Debeck that first appeared in The Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1919. This cartoon strip now called Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is still running today and has been syndicated to over 900 publications worldwide. These days of course Google is more famous as the name of the organisation and search engine founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. They were students at Stanford University and had registered the name Backrub for their new search engine. They thought the name was not good enough and in September 1997, Larry Page and another graduate student friend Sean Anderson brainstormed some new names. Sean suggested googolplex to which Larry responded with googol. Both were mathematical terms and googol was the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros, which reflected the fledgling company’s mission to organise the seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. Sean Anderson immediately conducted a search to see if googol was registered but he typed in ‘google’ by mistake. Larry liked the misspelt name even more and www.google.com was registered the same day on 15th September 1997. The mathematical terms googol and googolplex were coined by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of US mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938. Edward Kasner was fascinated by the conundrum of very large but finite mathematical numbers. In 1940, he co-authored a book with James Newman Mathematics and the Imagination in which, among other things, he pondered the mysteries of these large numbers: “A googolplex is much larger than a googol. You will get some idea of the size of this very large but finite number from the fact there would not be enough room to write it, if you went to furthest star, touring all the nebulae and putting down zeros every inch of the way.” Incidentally, the Googleplex became the name of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. As a verb, google had passed into the language by the year 2000. See also Great balls of fire and Heebie-jeebies.