I know that Google got its name from the word googol (10100), and that Google/google referring the search engine/using the search engine are recent additions to the dictionary. Their definitions are easily found for such meaning (example).
However, just for kicks, I did a Google Ngram search for the word "google" and "Google" and got some interesting results:
There is a drastic spike in the use of the word "google" around 1900, well before the website, or even the internet, existed. There is then some use throughout the next hundred years, where it starts to climb (because we now have Google).
Clearly this word had some meaning in the past ‒ does anyone know what it was?
Best Answer
Here's an attempt for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources. The best sources we have are the books themselves that create the Ngram in the question. If we click through to some of the results between 1898 and 1902 (for example), we can categorise them as follows:
Variation of goggle-eyed:
Synonym for surf-scooter duck, aka goggle-nose:
Onomatopoeic gurgle noise:
Definite OCR error:
OCR is optical character recognition, the method of scanning pages and automatically attempting (not always successfully) to convert it to plain searchable text.
Unknown:
Unknown, Google Books image illegible, probably OCR error:
Unknown, no preview:
Summary:
Finally, although we didn't encounter them in this sample, the OCR often gets the published date wrong and a recent book about the Google search engine may appear in the results as if it were published in the early 1900s.