Centillion or googolplex

Both are the names for large numbers.

Centillion is second largest named number after googolplex and the the largest number with a conventional name.

Why I am mentioning this? Well …

A googolplex is the number 10^googol, which can also be written as the number 1 followed by a googol zeros (i.e., 10¹⁰⁰ zeros).

And googol was the original name adopted by Larry Page and Sergey Brin for their search engine back in 1996.  Their search engine  was based on idea of PageRank teachnology. But there were not alone with this idea. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy. But as it is with everything else it is the ‘evolution’ of the idea which allows people to shine.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site (PageRank). Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol“, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle.

It is one of the key facts which changed the face of internet forever. I remember back in 1997 where Google basically wasn’t out there yet. Finding right content on internet was taking hours of looking on some websites not even sometimes related to our query.  But it was time when Internet was much appreciated anyway because it was simplifying information flow. Only difference was you had to remember the URL for the website that you know contains what you looking for.

It is like with phone numbers, you have to remember to number to carry with you notepad (those days mobile phone is dealing with all that, but back then carrying mobile phone it was like 1kb extra package ).

But now you have yellow pages, and 118 50 etc, where required information is so easy to get.

So Google does exactly what yellow pages, finding the information for you. But additionally it is ranking the websites. It is like let say you are looking for mechanic. You calling yellow pages, they are looking for nearest one, but also they are calling his clients and checking out with them if he is any good, checking his reputation and popularity and returning to you only with the one which scores the best. Isn’t that just too good to be true?

And that is exactly why when anyone says Google, you know it is the box where you typing ‘Centillion’ right now to check if what I wrote is actually true

But why I called this post Centillion or googolplex?

I want to call centillion all the big ideas and people involved in creating internet B.G. (Before Google). I have attached image from my materials I am working on called Internet Timeline, presenting all the important dates and names from the moment when idea of inter-network was born. It wasn’t idea of global network as we know it. Again ‘evolution’ brought this to this level we know it today.

Same as history of Internet, same history of Google. All we need is just innovative idea, then a bit of polishing (what I am calling evolution) through the years, and you ending with something so amazing.

Who knows, maybe flying cars seems like stupid idea right know, but in 10 years, where people will be putting their effort in some crazy idea from their dad’s garage…yes. Yes, we are the key to success, power of people. Big things were never accomplished by 1 person alone, but  ideas definitely were.

Internet Timeline

If you want to find out more about Internet history, just put the any of the names from above timeline into Google, and I bet it will bring you right result. I recoment http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/ or of course our internet shared brain – Wikipedia.