Bonus fact: the smile in their logo refers to the fact they sell everything from A to Z. Supposedly, the name Amazon was selected because it suggests a large scale, and since website listings were often A-Z back in the day, Amazon would be towards the top of the list. Bezos considered calling it “Relentless” ( meaning “that does not relent“) but friends thought that was “ sinister.” Bezos bought the domain anyway, and it still redirects to Amazon. The ubiquitous e-tailer was almost called “Cadabra” from “Abracadabra.” Mashable says Bezos then went with “Amazon” after his lawyer thought he said “Cadaver,” which would easily have gone down as the worst start-up name ever. It’s particularly fascinating when a brand takes a word, especially an unrelated noun, that already has a definition and reinvents it. Whether you find apples intimidating or otherwise is a personal inclination, but either way, the name isn’t going anywhere. According to the bio, Jobs named the company Apple when he was on “one of fruitarian diets.” After a visit to an apple farm, Jobs thought to himself “the name sounded ‘fun, spirited and not intimidating.'” The definitive Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson has the answer to this one. So he just shortened it to his second choice, eBay. However, when he tried for that domain name, it was already taken by Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company. When Pierre Omidyar was launching the site, it was owned by his consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. The word can mean an “uncultivated or boorish person lout philistine yokel.” Where did the name eBay come from?Īnother website that has changed the way people buy and sell online, eBay’s name is merely a shortened version of the founder’s first choice. The backcronym for this is “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Supposedly, the creators liked the word Yahoo as coined by Jonathan Swift in 1926 for Gulliver’s Travels. Original name: “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Just a few months later, they changed the name to Yahoo. Like Google, this venerable (and beleaguered) web portal was created in January of 1994 by a pair of Stanford grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Page snagged it, and that got the ball rolling. One of them, Sean Anderson, suggested “ Googolplex,” and Page liked the shortened version, “Googol.” Anderson then did a domain name search, but spelled it “Google,” and that domain was available. As the story goes, Page was in his Stanford office with some other grad students. The name Google is a play on the mathematical term googol, which is a one followed by 100 zeros-and it was a total accident. According to Google corporate history, Stanford students Larry Page and Sergei Brin created a search engine and called it “ BackRub.” Their first logo was Larry Page’s hand. If you need to search something, you “just Google it,” which is much like what happened with Xerox when copiers came into vogue.īut have you ever stopped to consider where some of these names come from, and what they mean? Take a look! Where did the name Google come from?Īs we all know, this company has pretty much redefined how people get things done on a day-to-day basis. Some of them, like Google, become synonymous with the act itself. In the modern world we occupy, tech company names like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others have become a major part of our daily life and conversations.
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