Comment by karaterobot

I don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on. And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to specific resources, and remembered to look it up.