Internet search engine Google is known as a tech giant that most people are familiar with, but did you know it was almost not called Google? Its original name back in 1996 was actually quite creepy – BackRub.
Google‘s name we know it as today was in fact coined from a fellow student’s misspelling, and co founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin ended up registering the name “google.com” only a few hours after a brainstorming session.
Google was almost not called Google and its original name was creepy
Google is an American multinational corporation and technology company that began as a search engine and now has the ability to run crazy tools like Google Earth’s ‘secret’ in-built feature that lets you explore the world like never before.
The popular internet search engine was founded on September 4, 1998, by two American computer scientists named Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California.
As explained by Stanford’s David Koller, and on Google’s own website, Page and Brin’s original search engine, created in 1996, was initially called “BackRub.”
The reason for the hilarious, and slightly creepy, name was because the program analyzed the web’s “back links” to understand how important a website was, and what other sites it related to.
BackRub operated on Stanford’s servers until it eventually took up too much bandwidth (the maximum amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given amount of time.)
However, by 1997, Larry Page seems to have decided that the BackRub name needed to change – to the new name Google.
Accidental spelling mistake coined the name Google
Stanford’s David Koller explained that Larry’s office was shared with several others, one being a graduate student named Sean Anderson.
In 1997, Larry and his co-workers discussed a number of possible new names for the search technology, brainstorming ideas to think of a name that would relate to just how much data they were indexing.
Fellow student Sean Anderson verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers).
Googol is a very large number that is expressed in numerals with the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes, while googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros.
Seated at his computer terminal, Sean Anderson checked to see if that domain name was taken, but accidentally searched for “google.com” instead of “googol.com.” Page liked that name even more, and within hours he registered the domain name for Brin and himself on September 15, 1997.
Years later, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s fondness for wordplay continued to dominate their company names since they rolled out a new operating structure and called it Alphabet.
Earlier this summer, Alphabet was named as a collection of companies, including Google of course, and it was revealed%2C%20which%20we%20strive%20for!): “We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!”
