Origin and history of googly

"amorous," 1900, perhaps connected with goggle, because the earliest reference is in goo-goo eyes. Use in reference to politics is from 1890s and seems to be a shortening of Good Government as the name of a movement to clean up municipal corruption in Boston, New York, etc. It soon was extended to mean "naive political reformer." Goo-goo as imitative of baby-talk is from 1863.

"to search (something) on the Google search engine," 2000 (do a google on was used by 1999). The domain google.com was registered in 1997. According to the company, the name is a play on googol and reflects the "mission" of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web." The word turns up in various contexts earlier: google-eyed seems to have been a dialectal or humorous variant of goggle-eyed in 1890s and after; and a verb google was an early 20c. cricket term in reference to a type of breaking ball, from googly.