Is there not a math talk forum somewhere for this?

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How many powers of ten would that be? :D
I think it is travel buzz.

The easy 'school days' prompt for US audiences....

A million is a thousand thousands.
A billion is a thousand millions.
A trillion is a thousand billions.

It's easy to remember once you know, just as the following is easy to remember.
A billion is a million millions
A trillion is a million billions
A quadrillion is a million trillions.

Numbers are stupid.

Except when we're using them to calculate status, right? :D

You win. Going by what happens at cash registers, it's clear this kind of thinking is in the majority
And for any number of other situations that are discussed in FT forums, including, but not limited to:

1. Counting upgrades secured or denied.
2. Counting the number of available First Class seats or calculating the chances of your upgrade.
3. Complaining about having to tip or not tipping enough.
4. Complaining about high fares or bragging about a good mileage run.
5. Tracking delayed arrival, by minutes, to seek compensation.

Having the usage of commas to separate thousands, and full stops to separate decimals, reversed in Continental Europe (anywhere else ?) is a significant nuisance to international exchange. Even more of a nusance is the way that Excel have never provided a straightforward way to overcome it for different users in diferent countries who exchange spreadsheet data.

Meanwhile, from Britain, it must be a generation or more since I last encountered billion meaning the old-fashioned million-million, instead of the uS-inspired thousand-million. We made the transition long ago.

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A resounding yes to your thoughts. I think, using a comma to represent the decimal point is uniquely European and counter-intuitive. It's called decimal point, not decimal comma.
Moreover comma represents a pause, and is appropriate to group and separate powers, giving sufficient pause to fathom the magnitude. A period is a more distinct and longer pause separating distinct and self contained grammatical entities. Decimal point separates wholes from those that are not, making the period the logical choice.
You have not seem billion used im the sense of a thousand million because Heath led conservative gobernment made a decision to adopt tje American convention in the mid seventies. You have to be careful when you read documents prior to change-over.
Scientists havr rationalised units and conventions with uniform success among scientists world wide beginning with the rationalised MKS units. Even within the MKS system there were fundamental difgerences in emu, esu units, that changed the form of some expressions. In one system you would multiply by a factor such as 4pi.
Emginners, industry and common folks who think numbers are stupid resist changes, precisely what happened to metric plans.
The differences between scientists and engineers have led to onw famous debacle.

Brazil is an interesting place. Some times it aligns itself with Continental European conventions, but at other times with US conventions. You never know what you're gonna get.

So, differently from most Latin American countries, it follows the US short scale (billion = thousand million). However, if follows Europe in the usage of comma and period to separate decimals and thousands.

google -a very big number 10-100 I think.

That's "gogol", not google!

If you're going to correct someone with an exclamation point, you should be correct.

As pointed out back in post #6, it's googol.

Gogol is a very famous Russian author.

....But even UK media seem to have adopted the US intuitive leap by thousands, the name following the comma (or decimal separation among the differently-abled).

A googol is 10 to the hundredth power. A googolplex is 10 to the googolth power.

A Google is a web site/search engine.