More than a quarter of a century after it was first launched, it’s safe to say that Google has well and truly integrated itself into our everyday lives – so much so, that the term is now also classed as a verb.
Got a burning question about how the world works? Google it. Got a strange pain in your stomach and don’t fancy waiting on hold to your GP? Google it.
Even though most people aren’t aware of the origins of the search engine’s name, everyone knows it was a perfect choice as it seems to just roll off of our tongues.
But in another world, we could have been referring to it by something which sounds much more risqué.
Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who came up with the idea for Google as part of a research project back in January 1996, gave the technology a very suggestive nickname to begin with.
Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a suggestive nickname for the search engine. (James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images)
The pair, from the US, unwittingly changed the way the entire world works by knuckling down to work on its creation in their free time at college, with the aim of reimagining how conventional search engines sorted search results.
Instead of ranking them in order of how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they wanted their technology to list them in order of popularity and got to writing their code.
Google was officially launched on 4 September, 1998, and we’ve never looked back – but if Page and Brin hadn’t gone back to the drawing board for a better name, it might have been a different story.
Two years before it went live, the computer scientists had dubbed the search engine – which was still in the works – ‘BackRub’, because it checked backlinks to estimate the importance of the web site before ranking it.
As I’m sure you can deduce, telling someone to ‘BackRub it’ just wouldn’t have the same effect – and could land you in quite the awkward massage situation if you weren’t careful.
Google was initially dubbed ‘BackRub’ by the computer scientists. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Thankfully, Page and Brin consulted their fellow graduate students about possible alternatives to the strange name and one plucky person suggested playing on the word ‘Googol’.
If you don’t know, this mathematical term refers to the number 1 being followed by 100 zeros – which, in layman’s terms, is just a ridiculously large number.
According to reports, the tech boffins decided to settle on this moniker as they reckoned it reflected their company’s mission to organise the immense amount of information available on the internet.
But apparently, after planning to purchase its domain and trademark the name, one of Page and Brin’s pals misspelt it as ‘Google’ – and the search engine we know and love was born.
The pair are said to have decided that they liked the word with the botched spelling a lot more, so settled on it.
So there you have it – and if you were blown away by this, wait until you find out what name Netflix nearly got lumbered with next.