Six famous brands, six weird names — Can you get them all right?

1. The student project that tried to map the internet

In 1996, two Stanford students built a tool that ranked websites based on how many others linked back to them. They called it Backrub, because it crawled the internet’s “backlinks.”
The project worked brilliantly, but the name felt awkward and forgettable. When they moved the tool to its own domain, they looked for a word that captured the vastness of the web itself.
That is how Google was born, inspired by googol, a mathematical term for a one followed by a hundred zeros. The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

2. The bookstore that refused to quit

Before becoming an online everything-store, this startup had a name that reflected its founder's own persistence: Relentless. Friends told him it sounded harsh, but he could not quite let go. Even today, relentless.com redirects to his website.
The founder wanted something that suggested scale, wonder, and flow. He eventually discovered it in the name of the world’s largest river.
The rebrand gave us Amazon, and that founder was Jeff Bezos.

3. The fizzy drink with a pharmacist’s touch

In 1893, Caleb Bradham mixed sugar, water, caramel, and rare spices to make a refreshing tonic he sold at his drugstore counter. He called it Brad’s Drink.
The name was fine for a local business but too plain for expansion. Bradham wanted something livelier and more scientific. He drew from pepsin, an enzyme thought to aid digestion, and from dyspepsia, meaning indigestion.
The new name soon bubbled up across America, and then all over the world: Pepsi-Cola.

4. The tech firm that took its cue from a fruit

A Canadian company called Research in Motion spent the 1990s building pagers and wireless networks. Its breakthrough came with a handheld email device featuring tiny, bumpy keys. A marketing team said the keyboard looked like the surface of a berry.
The nickname stuck, and the company eventually adopted it.
From then on, the world knew it as BlackBerry.

5. The running-shoe startup that dreamt of victory

Two Oregon men, Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, sold imported sneakers from the back of their car under the name Blue Ribbon Sports in the late '60s. It was functional but dull. As they began designing their own shoes, they searched for something bolder.
A friend suggested the name of the Greek goddess of victory. The word was short, powerful, and universal.
That is how the world began running with Nike.

6. The coffee chain that almost shipped itself

In the early 1970s, three friends in Seattle wanted to sell quality coffee beans and brewing equipment. They considered a few nautical names and nearly settled on one that sounded more like a trading post than a café: Cargo House.
Then they spotted a mining town called Starbo on a map, which reminded them of a character from Moby-Dick. The nautical theme stuck, and the siren logo followed. And that is how Starbucks got its name. The three friends were Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin, and Zev Siegl.

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It turns out that, sometimes, names evolve just like ideas do, and that even some of the biggest brands needed a second draft. So the next time a startup name makes you laugh, remember that Google, Nike, and Pepsi all sounded strange once too.

Now that you know who’s who, how many did you really get right?