How One Typo Destroyed Thousands Of Computers | Goggle.com

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If you were regularly using the internet in around 2006, there was a brief moment in time, where making one simple typo, would crash your computer, beyond repair. This typo was “Goggle.” The word had gone relatively under the radar for a couple of years, going unnoticed by most users just passing by, but as the world wide web continued to grow exponentially and more people started familiarizing themselves with a more respected website “Google”, more people started to notice it and saw just how devastating it really was. Such a simple word “Goggle” was basically the internet’s basilisk, instantly killing the computers of any user who simply type in the word. This wasn’t just annoying pop ups, this was something that actually did you harm, at least that was the word that was getting around. You see, “Goggle” was widely talked about during its day, a subject that got so popular it led to the creation of an antivirus commercial and a court case, but now, pretty much no information on it has survived. Similar to YouAreAnIdiot.org, there’s a couple articles and forums about it, but that’s about it. Everything else, has seemingly been lost to history. Even the WayBack Machine has blacklisted it from being archived on their database. It’s almost like the internet does not want you to know about Goggle, just because of how truly dangerous it was. These circumstances have instead just left the internet with mostly ambiguity, some recalling the website being very dangerous, others passing it off as an internet hoax, at least the media depicting it. Consequently, Goggle has since become an internet urban legend, frozen in the era it was conceived. Was the story of Goggle.com just a victim of its time, where online record keeping wasn’t much of a priority? Or was it something much darker?
In order to really understand the mysterious and devastating nature behind Goggle.com, we first need to focus on the website’s purpose, how it functioned, and how both these things worked together to lead to its prominence. To really get into comprehensive detail, we need to trace back to the website’s origins. As you could imagine, this will be quite difficult with the limited information out there. But there really is only a few missing pieces of the puzzle. There’s no definitive answers, but we can infer on when it was most likely created. The actual domain for goggle.com appears to have been registered on Valentine’s Day of 1998. This is actually a pretty interesting detail that I will get into in a minute. The identity of the creator is unknown. The website appeared to have been dormant for around 6 years until it reportedly became malicious in 2004, according to very few sources. What’s interesting is that there is no evidence of this website ever existing prior to 2006, and all internet archive sites either have the website blocked or simply didn’t keep record of it prior to this date. For all we know, goggle.com could have been some GeoCities website prior to 2004, and whether it was bought out by some malicious company or started off that way, is a mystery.
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