Comment by fenomas

I'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted this a lot of places over the years.

That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that the comic strip Barney Google was a very well-known pop-culture reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.)

So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.