Google

Larry Page and Sergei Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. But they changed the name to Google.

Supposedly, the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol" which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Googol was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide very large quantities of information.

The original Google search engine was on the Stanford University website servers with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The official domain name for google.com was registered on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998 when it was still based in a garage.

Some brands become generic nouns as the vernacular word for a category. Such is the case with brands such as Band-Aid (for any adhesive bandage) and Kleenex (for paper tissues) and in the past "fridge" for any refrigerator had originated with the Frigidaire brand. This is both an honor and a brand confusion issue.

People began to use "google" to mean a search engine and eventually as a verb, as in "I'll google that." Larry Page used it as a verb form before he even launched the company. Though not as commonly used to mean "to search" now, at one time "to google" might have meant to use Yahoo or Bing or AltaVista or any one of the other competing search engines.