People flabbergasted to learn what Google really stands for after 26 years

It's a tech giant most of us turn to every day.

Whether we're using Google phones, search engines, website browsers, watches or fitness trackers, it's hard to escape the trillion-dollar company on the internet. But despite this, many of us don't actually know what Google stands for.

Around 26 years after its launch, a perplexed Quora user queried: "Is Google an acronym?" And thankfully, people provided some answers to clear everything up.

Apparently, Google is a misspelling of Googol – the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was chosen to highlight founders Larry and Sergey's mission "to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful".

Before the search engine took off, it had a much stranger name. It was referred to as Backrub, which sounds a lot more seedy if you ask us!

A Google statement explains: "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). "

Some believe Google stands for 'Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth' – but this is actually a common misconception. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence to support the theory. The more you know!