If you were to google: #1 company to work for according to Forbes Magazine, the search result would render the very verb you just did - Google. Once merely a company name, the word became synonymous with the sport of online seeking. As in: I google, she/he googles, they googled all night long. So much so, in fact, that the word was added to the Meriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the mack-daddy lingo tome, the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.

The old axiom goes something like: Seek and ye shall find. In dot-com circles, that has been updated to a more relevant: Google and you shall find. (Because really, who says “ye” anyway?) An American public corporation that transformed the act of Internet research from taxing hit-and-miss mystery to surefire means to surpass your wildest info-fantasies, Google is more than a search engine. It’s a find engine.

But who really is Google? Is it a derivative of the last name of some crazed anti-social brainiac, Fredrick VonGoogleheimer? Not quite. Google is the e-baby of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at California’s Stanford University. The ambitious students hypothesized that existing Internet search engines – which ranked results based on the number of times the search term appeared on a page – could be greatly improved upon.

And so the idea of a search method analyzing the relationships between websites was conceived. (And for this little research project you call “Google”, you get an A.) Originally nicknamed BackRub (what were those feisty students doing in their spare time?), the name we have come to love (read: depend on) originated from their misspelling of the word “googol”, which refers to “10 to the power of 10”, when they went to register the domain name. Who says a typo can’t be an entrepreneur’s best friend?

Perhaps the only thing more satisfying than a topic well searched-and-found, is a logo well adapted-and-modified. Such is the case of the Google masthead – simple, friendly, and non-techie – which visually morphs to reflect specific Holidays and occasions, becoming known simply as Google Doodles. Don’t believe us? Google it.