Valleywag
genius at work
The $160 billion typo
Stanford student Sean Anderson was the guy who gave Larry Page the name of his search engine and company:Sean and Larry were in their office, trying to think up a good name — something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word "googolplex," and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, "googol." Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as "google.com," which he found to be available.Where does Sean currently work? Microsoft.
