Dubbed the ‘most powerful company in the world’, Google’s true meaning has been a recent revelation for many. The tech giant, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998, revolutionised internet usage.
Nowadays, the term ‘I Googled it’ is commonplace in discussions about how someone discovered information. However, Google’s empire extends beyond its search engine capabilities, encompassing Gmail, YouTube, Workspace, and hardware products like Pixel phones, Pixel Watch, and Fitbit.
Yet, 26 years post-launch, a curious Quora user posed the question: “Is Google an acronym? ” Surprisingly, Google’s name is derived from a typo of ‘Googol’, which signifies the numeral one followed by a hundred zeroes, chosen to symbolise their goal “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Before adopting its current moniker, the search engine was known as Backrub. A statement from Google details: “The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around.
“By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year, they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they 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. Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google (phew).”
Despite this, some internet users argue Google stands for ‘Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth’. However, this is considered to be false information due to the lack of evidence around the theory.
Commenting on the Quora user’s post, one social media user said: “The name was chosen to signify the vast amount of information that the search engine can access. It is not an acronym formed from the initials of words.”
Another user added: “Google doesn’t have any full form [but] many in the world assume and say Google stands for ‘Global Organization of Oriented Language Experts’.”
Looking for more revelations? Recently, people only just realised what the numbers on the toaster dial really mean. There are three types of toaster out there and the way yours works will very much depend on the brand.
One person took to Reddit to ask: “UK Redditors, help settle an argument. Do toaster dials all mean the same, so a 5 on my toaster is the same as a 5 on yours. Or do the numbers on toaster dials mean minutes, so a 5 means 5 minutes of toasting.
