People are only just realising what Google means 26 years after company launched
It would be a struggle for many to get through the day without using Google.
The majority of are familiar with it as a search engine – with 'Google it' being a common phrase people use. And what's more, it can also play a major role in how we track our fitness, use smart devices and watch online videos.
But despite becoming a trillion-dollar company being a staple in our lives, people don't actually know how the company got its name. The tech giant was founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998.
Approximately 26 years after its launch, people have been asking "Is Google an acronym?" and other similar questions on Quora and social media sites. Thankfully, we have an answer for you.
Google is a misspelling of Googol - the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was chosen to represent the company's mission "to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". It was previously called Backrub, which sounds like a much cheekier service if you ask us!
While some are adamant Google stands for 'Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth', this is actually a common misconception.
The Google website reads: "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). "
