“The internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, people without lives.” – Dave Barry
Today, I’ll continue my look at how companies and their products came to get their names or, in many cases, change them. This time I’ll be examining companies that exist primarily in our computers and phones. In other words, some of today’s biggest tech companies — the ones that used to be known by the acronym FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google).
In 2003, when he was a student at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg developed facemash.com, an online version of the printed student guides that were offered by several colleges at the time. Because his new venture involved hacking into Harvard’s computer network, Zuckerberg’s site was quickly shut down by the university’s administration.
The following year Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com and the rest is history. Until 2021, that is, when Facebook changed its name to Meta because of its intention to further embrace the use of artificial intelligence. The exact reason for the name change, said Zuckerberg, was to reflect the company’s new metaverse aspirations “where instead of just viewing content, you are in it.”
Before it started selling books in 1994, Amazon was called Cadabra (from “abracadabra”). Then, CEO Jeff Bezos’s lawyer told him the reference might be too obscure for most people to understand. Also, it didn’t help that people calling the retailer often heard “cadaver” instead.
After looking through the dictionary, Bezos decided on Amazon because, like the river, he saw his internet company being one of the world’s largest.
Founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1998 in the midst of the dot-com bubble, Netflix has always been Netflix (so much for my theory that all the FANG companies once had different names). About the only thing Netflix has to add to this piece about the changing names of internet companies is its creation of something called Cinematch, a service that recommended shows for their subscribers to watch.
The G in FANG was Google, which changed its name to Alphabet in 2015, at which time it made the popular search engine a subsidiary of the new company. The change allowed the company to diversify its offerings by developing new products (which it called new “bets”).
Company co-founder Larry Page (along with Sergey Brin) explained at the time that the name Alphabet was the appropriate name for the venture because it’s “a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations and is the core of how we index with Google search.”
Before it became Google, the company’s early version had been known as BackRub because its program analyzed the web’s “back links” to understand how important a website was. Google became Google in 1997 when Stanford University grad student Sean Anderson, who was brainstorming a new name with Page and Brin, suggested “googolplex” and did a web search to see if “googol” was available as a web domain name. (A “googol” is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes.) But Anderson typed “google” by mistake. It was available, and the rest is history.
(Going back further, the word “googol” was reportedly coined by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta when his uncle, who was a mathematician, asked him to come up with a name for the big number. It’s thought that the youngster may have been influenced by the comic strip “Barney Google” drawn by cartoonist Billy DeBeck.)
As the search engine’s name has undergone what’s known as generification (the use of brand names for all similar products — think “Kleenex” and “Frisbee” and “Rollerblade”), “Google” the noun has retained its initial capital while “google” is correct for the verb form.
There are many more interesting stories about the name changes of internet companies ranging from AOL to eBay and Yahoo (yet another hierarchical officious oracle) that I don’t have room for here. If you want to find out more about the name changes of those and other internet companies, you can always (lowercase) google them.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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