At Virtual China, my Institute for the Future colleague Lyn Jeffery tells the back story of è°·æŒ ("song of the grain"), the Chinese name for Google. (In an earlier post, Lyn follows the fun that Chinese bloggers are having with the Google logo and riffing on what other "song of the grain" services might be called in Chinese.) Apparently, the company had been working on a name since 2002. From Lyn's translation of an E-Business World article:
A 2005 survey by CNNIC showed that there was no time to wait. 43% of Chinese Internet users referred to the search engine with the English word "Google," 26% used a Chinese pronunciation, "gougou" ("dog dog") and 13% used a Chinese pronunciation, "gugou," that sounds like "ancient dog." Google undertook its own survey and discovered an even larger range of imaginative pronunciations, including "guoguo" (fruit fruit) and "gougou" (check check)…
The final choice, è°·æŒ (goo-guh, song of the grain), appeared to Google's Asia Pacific Chief Marketing Officer, Wang Huainan, late in 2005. It means "Song of the Grain," expressing the abundance of harvest, but also "Song of the Valley"–a reference to the company's Silicon Valley roots, according to Zhang Jing, Director of Marketing, Asia Pacific.
