We’ve even shared that Back To The Future very nearly went by a very different, pretty hilarious name.
But even I, who come across unexpected name stories all the time at work, found Google’s original moniker unusually funny.
What was it?
According to Google themselves, “The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University.”
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met and reportedly “disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting.”
But within a year, they’d become partners and worked to create a search engine that ranked the importance of different links on the Web.
And that engine was called, I kid you not, BackRub.
Apparently, the name was chosen because their new system used the “back links” of pages to prioritise them.
And apparently, the new name ― which the search engine earned in 1997 ― was a typo.
Huh?
According to Stanford’s David Koller, the now-famous name came about in September of 1997, when the team were brainstorming new brands on a whiteboard.
They were looking for “something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data,” Koller said. So Sean Anderson called out the word “googolplex.”
“Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers),” Koller wrote.
So, Sean looked up the name to see if the domain was still available. And in doing so, Koller claims “he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as ‘google.com,’ which he found to be available.”
“Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name ‘google.com’ for himself and Sergey,” Koller alleges.
Google doesn’t confirm this on their site, simply stating that their current name matched the founders’ mission “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
However it came to be, we can all agree it’s a googol better than “BackRub”...