Other online options...

Just as a quick update to the post on Google's 11th birthday, the homepage (or at least it has where I am!) now has a link to Project 10 to the 100 (googol) which is simply a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. They've done it before with great success.
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Other options...but not many! Google is eleven years old today (11...not double l)...so young yet so mature and advanced. Hehehe. It was also the very first web page I ever visited and now, probably, apart from the BBC (yeah, yeah, the irony isn't lost) the one I use most. Click on the image to see what they have to offer: much, much more than most people think, depite everyone knowing it to be one of the World's most recognisable and powerful brands, the most visited webpage, the most used search engine and to top it all consistently in the top of the Best Places To Work surveys...

It began as a 'mere' research project by Larry Page and then Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University. The name they decided on - Google - is a play on the numeric term googol. Just imagine if their logic had gone for another similar name: other names for a googol include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale (what the UK uses now: the system whereby every new numeric term is 1,000 times the previous term) ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale (you guessed it, a million times the previous term and what the UK used to use up until 1974; it seems so long ago!) or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale (the traditional European scale with such 'stylish' terms such as milliard, billiard and trilliard) Tables HERE on Wiki scroll down half a page) None have quite the same ring to them! If you think the word googol sounds a wee bit childish it was thought up by the 9 year old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner.