Pues la primera respuesta sobre google era la correcta, nada como acudir a la fuente:
Cita: What Google means
Google is a play on the word "googol", which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googol is a very large number. There isn't a googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles, not atoms. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite, amount of information available on the web.
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html