Googol

I've been using Google as a search engine for quite a while, and had been at the time I made Googol initially. Everyone uses Google now, of course. Anyway, I'm a math person, and one day I was looking at the logo and wondered how easy it would be to make it say 'Googol', a word meaning ten to the hundredth power (that is, ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion). I edited the logo a bit with Paint and some Photoshop - removed some shadow, moved the l right, copied an o, added 'not' above the TM, made the logo a bit longer (looks decent) - and voila!

Now, one of the things that is a really great way to pass time is to write or edit HTML. Googol has a lot of HTML, and did in those days too. The news page (when I first got it, at least) had 102 KB of text on it. That's pretty daunting. It took hours to change. I think I started with the Web, then Images, Groups, and Froogol, making sure to preserve the -gol ending and the search feature (it's important!), which actually links back to the corresponding search on the Google webpage. Then I did the News section. It took a while, and I had to learn basic inline CSS, for I originally designed it to have all links leading to itself, but that was irritating if you clicked anywhere and it made all the links purple (bad). So, I used a bit of CSS code to make it not only smaller but easier to use. The links were replaced with nice fake links - move your mouse over it, looks like a link, but clicking will get you nowhere. This is a fun psychological tactic that I later used for other annoying or strange sites.

It took a while to think of the news stories. Some of them are sort of funny, but a lot of them are just stupid. I have to update the Athens one, as the Olympics already happened. I plan to eventually reproduce and make fun of the entire Googol web site, including the help sections, then work on maybe making a fake foreign-language version. I dunno. We'll just have to wait and see. I don't think I'll make Googol Earth or anything like that, though. What do I look like, someone with only one project to do?