You guys have been really getting into the backstories of well-known brand names, and today we tackle Google’s history.
Call Me By My Name: Google
Check out this #tellthetruths video, and please share if you know of any great brand stories we should cover in the future.
This video originally appeared in LinkedIn.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hi guys! It’s Rebeca with BrandTrue and today I want to do another one of those videos about a well-known brand name that used to have a different name. Today we’re gonna talk about Google. Some of these stories are more well-known than others. This one’s a little more obscure. Google, when it was first launched was called Backrub. Interesting, right? And the reason it was called Backrub is because it was actually linked to the way it functioned. It was analyzing websites’ back links to figure out which websites were more popular. And that was the big thing that was different about their search engine, is that it wasn’t just in a random order. The more popular hits would be shown first.
So, this was great, but after a couple of years, they realized that they were scraping, analyzing massive amounts of data, and that was a differentiator for them. So they wanted a new name that would better reflect that and they decided to use this mathematical term, this almost impossible to conceive of large number, so large that it’s not “million” and “billion”, it’s a mathematical equivalent of “bajillion”. It’s like, just so huge. And it’s called a googolplex. And they decided to use that. They made a mistake and misspelled it, but… Too late! We now have “Google” spelled the way it’s spelled. It’s an awesome name! It’s interesting… the idea that being a massive number isn’t really salient, it isn’t really accessible to the public at large, but it’s just a great name. It’s fun, easy to say, and very, very verb-able, which you have probably heard me talk about before. Yahoo was Yahoo, it wasn’t so easily turned into a verb, “Just Yahoo it.” And when Google came along, I would argue that it’s another reason why it was so much more effective and really took off was because “Just Google it.” That’s what I think. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Bye!
