People surprised to learn what Google actually means after 26 years

Google is one of the most recognisable companies out there.

But despite becoming a trillion-dollar company since it was founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998, people are still learning new things about it.

Despite many of us using applications like Gmail, YouTube and Workspace every day, many of us don't actually know what Google stands for or how it got its name.

Around 26 years after its launch, a confused Quora user asked: "Is Google an acronym?" And thankfully, people were very forthcoming with their answers.

According to commenters, 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".

The search engine was previously called Backrub, which definitely sounds like a very different type of service!

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). "

Some believe Google stands for 'Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth' – but this is actually just an urban legend that's not evidenced.