First usage of the name “Google” from 1942?


Denis, a co-founder of OPENXTRA, was reading a story to his son last night. He was rather surprised to find a character in the book called Google.

The book is called Circus Days Again by Enid Blyton, the book is copyright 1942, though the version quoted is from a battered 1962 edition. The reference starts on page 50.

“Yes - it’s just the sort of thing you’d like to do yourself, isn’t it,” grinned Stickly Stanley, who knew what a little monkey Lotta was. “Well, the third clown is Google. He’s really funny too. He has a wonderful motor-car, and everything goes wrong with it–and in the end it blows up into a hundred different pieces! Google has a fine little dog called Squib. You’ll like him. He helps Google with his nonsense.”

Are there any earlier references?

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5 Comments

  1. Cool, but perhaps would have been more surprising if the book had mentioned search (or perhaps time travel, heh) :)

    You know Google was named as such because of a mis-spelling of googol?

    Quote | Posted November 8, 2007, 1:47 pm
  2. @Chris - now that would have been newsworthy! A search engine would have seemed pretty bizarre in 1942.

    Quote | Posted November 9, 2007, 9:11 am
  3. Wasn’t google the named coined by a maths professor’s child when he as searching for a name for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros? Hang-on…

    Ah, sorry it seems as though that was Googol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) - although I don’t remember it being written that way when I first read about it.

    Anyhow, the Wikipedia suggests 1913: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book

    Cheers

    Alan a.k.a. The Open Sourcerer

    Quote | Posted November 9, 2007, 11:50 am
  4. @Alan - Thanks for the reference. Darn, only 29 years out. ;)

    Quote | Posted November 9, 2007, 12:45 pm
  5. Pretty interesting and no, I did not know that :)

    Quote | Posted November 20, 2007, 8:45 am

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