Is Google Really Changing its Name?

So is Google really called "Topeka" now? According to the search box, yes. Why? They say they like the name and quoted, “all roads lead to Kansas.” When you click on the Google logo, there is a long explanation for the change. This is big news and may take some time to get used to. Personally, I don’t see it as a smart move, but then again, I’m not as in-tune as the Google promotional team is.

So what is Google and how did they originate? Here’s the story from Wikipedia.

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy. Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub," because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle. Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

Article link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

So the next time you want to say to someone “Google it,” remember, it’s “Topeka it” now! Or could it be April 1st?