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Comment by bhandziuk | Hacker News Reader

What is a "Google"? It's not even a word. It caught on though.

The most important thing for a brand name like this to be is:

  1. Simple to remember and easy to pronounce.
  2. Unique and stands out from other generic names.
  3. Aesthetically sounds/looks good.

Under this criteria: "Google" works. "Bing" works. "DuckDuckGo" does not work.

I always figured it was simple because of the Duck Duck Goose correlation. It certainly stands out. And I do like it because of the Duck Duck Good implication. I think fitting those 3 criteria is personal taste.

I think that it can also be perceived as derivative from goggles[0], and it fits pretty good.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goggles

Its from googolplex, the name of a very large integer that is equal to 1 followed by 10100 zeroes

That word is "googol". Google is nothing. It's a play on words we've gotten used to like DuckDuckGo.

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