It's actually two misspellings that counteract each other. Yes, the googol is the number, but when naming the number the mathematician asked his nephew what it should be, who responded with the name of his favorite cartoon character, spelled Google.
> name of his favorite cartoon character, spelled Google
Source? A web search is not corroborating this version. What I can find is this, from Perfect Figures (Crumpacker, 2007):
> On a walk with Milton and Milton’s brother, he asked if either of them had any ideas, and Milton came up with googol.
> At this late date—Milton died in 1980—we can only speculate about why that was the word he thought of. Did he like the burbly, messy, baby sound of goo? Or did it sound monstrous, like a name for an ogre? Had he heard of Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes?”
Seems like this explanation is at best pure speculation. (Didn’t stop someone from adding it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Google_and_Snuffy_Smith as a factual claim, improperly referencing the book quotation above. I just fixed it.)
I'm guessing this question is unresolvable, given that nine year old Milton never specified where he got the idea of the google word.
Apparently Larry found it a convincing enough story that the first book scanned for Google books was The Google Book, which was itself th source for the name Barney Google.
