People are just realizing Google had a very bizarre first name with a clever hidden meaning

GOOGLE had a very different name when it was first created.

You probably see Google dozens of times a day – but the branding could have been very different.

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Google kicked off way back in January 1996.

It was a clever research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin – now tech titans, but at the time PhD students at Stanford University.

At the time, search engines would count how many times a website would reference the term.

But Google was based on the idea a website’s worth may be better measured by its page count – and the websites that link back to it.

This algorithm was called PageRank.

And the search engine was named BackRub, as it took count of “backlinks” to measure the importance of a website.

Eventually the name was changed to Google, which somehow manages to be less weird than BackRub.

So how did the name Google come about?

It was a play on words linked to the mathematical term googol, which means a huge number (one followed by 100 zeroes).

This was supposed to represent how Google would handle enormous amounts of web data.

And Google is how the brand has remained ever since.

An early version of the Google logo had an exclamation mark after the word.

But it was eventually dropped to just read: Google.

Now the brand is used for a host of beloved gadgets, apps and services, inclining Google Maps, Google Earth and the Google Pixel smartphone.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk