The Search Continues

Well, my search for which blogger tool to use continues. It has been interesting. I started off with a little known program called VineType. It's made by a single programmer. It's free for non-profit use. (The programmer is a Christian, and he's sympathetic to non-profits.) I bought a license for commercial use of it. The app didn't really work out very well for me.

So, I'm currently experimenting with the free offerings of Blogger.com, which is owned and operated by gargantuan Google. Speaking of which, I found out tonight an interesting tidbit about their name. I'm a bit of a trivia buff when it comes to etymology. I'll have to tell you some time the origin of the expression "OK." Hint: It's not from a woman's name, so quit spelling it as "okay." Anyhow, back to Google's name origin.

Obviously, the word "goggles" refers to eye pieces, and "oogle" refers to looking something over real thoroughly. Not hard to see the combination there for naming a website that's made for looking stuff up. But now think about how very many websites Google has to index. A very big number, yes? Now, we're onto something little known and rather interesting.

According to a NOVA article on the PBS website, "A Googol is 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeroes, and is the largest named number in the West." Who knew? Some power-Geek at NOVA, apparently.

The author went on to say that, "The Buddhists have an even more robust number, 10¹⁴⁰, which they know as asankhyeya."

Since asankhyeya translated into English means "most terrible name for a website", I can see why the bright Geeks at Google didn't choose to try to infuse that big number name into their company moniker. (Who in the West could even say asankhyeya, let alone spell it?)