Googol

Main Entry: goo·gol Pronunciation: 'gü-"golFunction: nounEtymology: coined by Milton Sirotta b ab 1929 nephew of Edward Kasner died 1955 American mathematician: the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros equal to 10100

Thank you Mirriam Webster on-line for helping me to remember where Google probably got it's name. I learned about googols more than four decades ago, when the transistor was just beginning to be put down in multiples on a single piece of silicon.

A transistor roughly equals a one or a zero. It takes at least eight billion similar little on/off switches to create a single gigabyte that now comes on a key chain for less than $20. More than 5 billion key fobs of data are transmitted every year (ie more than 5 exabytes). Google has seriously targetted doing a searchable scan of every page of every book ever published (30 million plus books). I don't even need to do the math to know that a googol makes an exabyte look small and an exabyte can probably handle all 30 million books with plenty of room to spare.

So now that virtually every word ever written may soon be searchable, the question is this: What word shall we search for most fervently?

See John 1:1 for answer.