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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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?
@Chris – now that would have been newsworthy! A search engine would have seemed pretty bizarre in 1942.
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
@Alan – Thanks for the reference. Darn, only 29 years out.
Pretty interesting and no, I did not know that