Funnily enough, this actually isn’t terribly far from the truth.

“Google” is officially a misspelling of “googol”, which is the name for the number 10¹⁰⁰.

But then “googol” was coined as a word by a 9-year-old in 1920 (to be used by his mathematician uncle). And it’s possible that this 9-year-old was inspired by the contemporary comic strip character Barney Google:

So, “Google” might be a misspelling of a misspelling of “Google”. 🙃

Sources:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20120627081942/http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol#Etymology