Comments on: Googol or google buns – where does that name really come from?

By: James Farmer

James Farmer — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:30:50 +0000

I know! We’ve got some new versions and picked up some of the old illustrated ones the other day… what’s particularly interesting to me though isn’t the names so much as the way they change the chores… they all work in the garden now rather than just joe while the girls help mother!!!

Interesting thought though (we’ve got two little girls) about what kind of models you want to expose them to…

Time to get out the brothers Grimm and scare the sh*t out of them perhaps :o)

By: Set Free

Set Free — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 21:07:49 +0000

I Love the threee books of the faraway tree adventures and agree with you in all entirety, save for the shamefull renaming of the three children from 'Jo, Bessie and Fanny' to the PC version of 'Joe Beth and Franny', book censorship is the thin wedge of fascism

By: Monkeymagic

Monkeymagic — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 01:25:57 +0000

Go Ogle Moonface

Three cheers for incorporated subversion �James Farmer and his theory about the naming of Google.You see the real source for the name [Google] is Enid Blyton, in particular from The Magic Faraway Tree series where Silky and Moon Face are…

By: Anjo

Anjo — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 23:49:12 +0000

I vaguely remember reading the term googol in Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" series a while back but cannot find it again (it is not in the index of my copies). Always thought that Knuth coined googol first. As said, it is difficult to invent new words :-). An alternative inspiration for Google as the company name, is that it was a pun on Tim Koogle, the CEO of Yahoo (a major search engine when Google was developed). I posed this theory to some colleagues, but as mathematicians, they thought Google had to originate from googol.