Meet my son Google

Move over Vickys and Buntys. For Indians, Google is the new 'it' name for kids. In 2005, for the first time in the world, a Swedish couple named their baby boy Oliver Google Kai after their favourite search engine.

Move over Vickys and Buntys. For Indians, Google is the new 'it' name for kids. In 2005, for the first time in the world, a Swedish couple named their baby boy Oliver Google Kai after their favourite search engine.

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The word Google is derived from Googol, a mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google — the search engine's name stands for the company's mission to arrange web information systematically.

It may have taken seven years for the trend to trickle down to India, but you'll now find many children nicknamed Google right from metros to small towns.

And if you thought it's the cute sound of the word that's fascinating parents, listen to this: "A name must be in sync with your personality. I have named my three-year-old son Google because whenever something is lost in the house, he finds it in five minutes flat," said homemaker Uma Dhawan from Ludhiana.

Delhi-based lawyer Munish Chander Joshi gives a similar reason for naming his newborn child as Google.

Businessman Mohammad Umar from Balia in Uttar Pradesh has also named his four-year-old son Google. "When I took him to a cyber café for the very first time, he got glued to Google. Now he wants to look up for everything on Google. So we decided to call him Google, and his name has made him hugely popular among his friends," said Umar.

Psychologist Pulkit Sharma explained why people are picking unusual names for their children. "Parents want their children to be unique. They feel that one way to achieve this is by giving the child an exotic name," he said. As for Google, he said, "People associate a lot of things with Google — they find it a big, intelligent, friendly and down-to-earth search engine which has answers for all their queries. It's like a scientific god and maybe that's why people love to name their children Google."