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Resubmit: GOOGLE'S A REAL GIGGLE (especially if you happen to be the 26th richest human on earth!)

Legend has it that the Google name itself was a misspelling of Googol (a nonsense word meaning 10 to the power of 100, coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, when asked by his mathematician uncle, Edward Kasner, to think of a way of expressing an unimaginably long series of zeroes after an integer).

Two computer science students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, became obsessed with the problem of trawling through rapidly increasing masses of documents to retrieve specific data. Their prototype search engine would be named Googol - but, as luck would have it, neither knew the "correct" spelling of the word, hence Google, Inc (subsequently Google.com) which, in less than a decade, has enhanced the net worth of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both only 34, to US16.6 billion, ranking them the 26th richest humans on Earth.

It's amazing how Google has insinuated itself into our virtual lives in just nine years. When a brandname becomes a commonly used verb, you know it's here to stay. Gone are the days when you had to go to your nearest library to look something up. These days you simply Google it.

I remember my very first email account on Hotmail, circa 1998. Then Yahoo! came along and lots of folks switched. In those pre-spam, pre-pps days, nobody even thought about mailbox capacity. Along with broadband came obese files and all it took was one inconsiderate friend to send you a 3MB file - and that was enough to jam your inbox. Then Google introduced Gmail with the incredible offer of one free gigabyte of storage space... and before long we had all these Google AdSense wordlinks popping up on every webpage. One of the most exciting ideas presented by Google is, of course, Google Earth - a program that allows you to zoom in on your own house from an earth-orbiting altitude (remember that poignant scene in 'Men In Black' when Agent K decides to look in on his long-lost wife via live satellite feed on his computer?)

What I personally like about Google is that they have managed to retain the quirky sense of humor that sets the best and brightest computer wizards apart from run-of-the-mill nerds. If you look to the right of Google's famous search bar and click on "Preferences" you'll be offered a vast choice of interface languages - including Esperanto, Pig Latin, Serbo-Croatian, Quecha, Scots Gaelic, Sundanese, Telugu, Tatar, Uighur, Xhosa, and Zulu. Just

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