Googol and Google - Zillo and Zillow
March 6, 2008 – 6:56 pmWhen Larry and Sergey of Google were trying to come up with a name for the company, they thought they were spelling Googol ( 1 googol = 1.0 × 10 to the power of 100) correctly when they spelled it Google.
This misspelling was a good thing for the company since no one spells Googol the way it should be spelled.
Zillow.com, the popular real estate information site has a small problem. I wouldn’t even call it a problem but a small inconvenience for the user who actually wants to go to zillow.com. It looks like a good amount of people are searching for Zillow with words like Zillo.com, Zillo or Zilo.
As far as I know, Zillow is not advertising on any other keywords on Google except for the terms Zillo and Zilo.
Take a look at the below graph that shows a parked site and the amount of traffic they are receiving. There is a positive correlation with the success of Zillow and sites like this.
The hard thing about this from a company standpoint is many of the domain names are already taken. For example, the zillo domain was bought in 1999. This is 5 years before Zillow.com launched. I guess the only other option is to buy this domain from the company but who really wants to that?
