What is a six-letter word that immediately comes to mind when you need some information on the Internet? You probably thought of Google. But Google wasn’t always the name of the famous search engine. In fact, the original name was BackRub!
BackRub was the name two graduate students gave to the new search engine they developed in 1996. They called it BackRub because the engine used backlinks to measure the popularity of Web sites. Later, they wanted a better name — a name that suggests huge quantities of data. They thought of the word googol. (A googol is a number followed by 100 zeros.) When they checked the Internet registry of names to see if googol was already taken, one of the students misspelled the word by mistake, and that’s how Google was born.
Google is just one example of a name change in the business world. Many other companies have decided to change their names or the names of their products. Here are some more examples:
Jerry Yang and David Filo, two young computer specialists, developed a guide to Internet content in 1994. They called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to World Wide Web.” But they soon realized that this wasn’t a very catchy name, so they searched through a dictionary and found a better one: “Yahoo.”
Sometimes companies change their names because of the popularity of one of their products. In 1962, a young runner named Phil Knight started a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. In 1971, Knight decided to design and manufacture his own brand of shoes. He named the shoes after the Greek goddess of victory — Nike. Nike shoes became so well known that Knight changed the name of the whole company to Nike.
小题1:According to the text, Google .
A．has been famous since 1996
B．is a result of a spelling mistake
C．means a number followed by 100 zeros
D．is the original name of the search engine小题2:Jerry and David changed the guide’s name to Yahoo because the original name .
A．had been registered
B．had been forgotten
C．was not attractive
D．was too short小题3:The company Nike got its name from .
A．its founders
B．its customers
C．its popular products
D．its advanced techniques小题4:Which of the following can be the best title for the text?
A．The name changes
B．The history of Google
C．How to choose a name?
D．Why are names important?
