What's a 'google,' anyway?

"Google" derives from the cricket term "googly," a cricket ball that is bowled as if to break one way that actually breaks in the opposite way. But that's not how Google Inc got its name. During a brainstorming session, the two founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) came up with "Googol," the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects Google’s mission to "organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web," per the Google website. Both Page and Brin thought "googol" was spelled "google" and registered it that way when securing an Internet domain name. Oops. But the rest is history.