Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stumbled on the name by mistake

After nearly 30 years being the most popular search engine, people are only just finding out what Google actually stands for.

Google was founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California in September 1998.

There is no questioning that Google has transformed the way we surf the internet.

I mean, when we want to search things up on the internet, a lot of us will say ‘Google it’, despite the fact there are many other search engines out there.

And even if your pal is a Bing user, we all know what you mean when someone says ‘Google it’.

People are only just finding out what Google stands for. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The brand is so much more than a search engine though, as it also operates Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps, while also having its own range of smartphones and smart watches.

When Page and Brin first began the project in 1996 the search engine was known as ‘Backrub’.

This was because it was focused purely on backlinks, telling users where the information came from.

The search engine was also intended to tell users what websites were trusted on what topics, and subsequently ranking them accordingly.

But just a year later, the computer scientists felt a name change was in order, and ultimately came up with Google.

And good job they did, really, as the name really is known across the globe by billions of people.

But what does Google actually mean?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders. (James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images)

In fact, Google is a misspelling of Googol – which for those who aren’t that tech savvy means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Stanford computer scientist David Koller explained: “Sean [Anderson] [fellow PHD student] and Larry [Page] were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name – something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data.

“Sean verbally suggested the word ‘googolplex,’ and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, ‘googol’.”

So, with the name decided on, all the inventors had to do was see if the domain was available.

And this is where Anderson made quite the mistake.

Koller added: “Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as ‘google.com,’ which he found to be available.

“Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name ‘google.com’ for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).”