Amsterdam office with the huge answer

Jan 14, 2008 11:32 GMT  ·  By

The photo on the left was taken in the Google Amsterdam office and it's a reminder of the many many pages indexed by Google. How so? Well, if there's a search query that has over 100 returns, you'll get to see the whole 10 "O"s, and clicking each one will redirect you to the next 10 pages of results.

There might yet be some connection between the way the "next results" are displayed and the Googol, the large number 10100. In case you weren't familiar with the fact, the domain that Brinn and Page were initially after was googol.com, but they weren't able to convince Silicon Valley Engineer, Tim Beauchamp, who owned it at the time and used it as a site for math and astronomy, to give it up.

You can actually see the URL changing when hovering with the mouse above the different "o"s to "?.start=10", "start=20" and so on. But the reason that they chose to bring it up in size and display it in their Amsterdam Office building is beyond my power of understanding. Perhaps it's a statement of fashion, perhaps they were bored with the two "o"s that must have come to haunt them by now, perhaps they had a big wall at hand and no idea what to decorate it with.

Whatever the true reason is, I think it just goes to show power. Yahoo! has two "o"s in its name, the same as Google, but Google clearly outshines the Sunnyvale based company. I guess it's about how many of such letters you have in your brand name and how you show that to the world, after all. Not that I'd mind, but I wouldn't want to see other companies follow in these footsteps, like "Mc Dooooooooooonald's" or "Dooooooooooodge".