Did You Know That Google Originally Had Quite A Risqué Name?
But, it doesn't mean what you think it means; it's actually a nerdy play on words.
By Celine Low — 20 Feb 2024, 01:21 PM
If you need to look something up, you instinctively think of Googling it. But imagine if you used 'Backrub' instead — how odd would that sound?
Yeah, no. That doesn't sound right.
Google was founded in 1995 at Stanford University by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, originally under the name "Backrub"
Page and Brin built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub as a nod to its analysis of the web's "back links", according to Google.
According to Stanford's David Koeller, about a year after Backrub was launched, Page and his colleagues began brainstorming potential new names for the search engine technology, focusing on names that related to the indexing of immense amounts of data.
It was actually a graduate student at Stanford named Sean Anderson who came up with the name Google
Anderson initially verbally suggested the word "googolplex", and Page shortened it to "googol", Koeller wrote.
The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number "1" followed by 100 zeros, and reflecting Page and Brin's mission to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
But the name Google was actually born out of a spelling error
Anderson checked if "googol.com" could be registered as a domain name, but accidentally searched for the name "google.com" instead, which was found to be available.
Page liked the new name and registered the domain name for himself and Brin on 15 September 1997.
And the rest is pretty much history.
Without these name changes, we might have found ourselves saying, "Let's Backrub how to give back rubs!" :P
