Google [1998] The search engine Google was launched in 1998 and the name almost immediately became a verb. The name was based on the word googol, a term for ten to the power of a hundred. According to the first account of this word in Kasner and Newman’s Mathematics and the Imagination (1940), ‘The name ‘googol’ was invented by a child (Dr Kasner’s 9-year-old nephew), who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a hundred zeros after it.’ At the same time as his suggested ‘googol’, he gave a name for a still larger number: googolplex.