Google, now arguably the most ubiquitous brand in the world, didn’t start with that name.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched their search engine on Stanford University’s servers as Back massage – capitalizing on the fact that their nascent project tracked down links on websites to index their importance.

But within 12 months, Page got over that name and started looking for something better.

Google ironically grew out of an experience that would become a core part of SEO – a typo. The duo were brainstorming new names when a Stanford colleague Sean Anderson suggested “googolplex” and Page: “googol” the term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Anderson jumped online to check if the domain name was available and mistyped it as “google.com”, and a legend was born. David Koller of Stanford tells the origin story here.

Choosing a name for your startup is difficult. VC investor Alan Jones recently wrote about how it just has to be “good enough” here. At the Startup Daily, we asked Jones about the phenomenon of misspelled familiar words – or did we think, license plate names like Rumin8.

And CrunchBase – big name – has been investigate the matter and discovered four major trends in startup naming, as well as offering advice from branding consultancies NameStormers founder Michael Carr, who says only one thing with a name that matters: “Can people remember it?”.

(We wonder if they did when Google landed in 1997 – they certainly do now).

Here are the top four approaches Crunchbase discovered when looking at hundreds of startup names:

1. A single dictionary word

Fintechs are “abundant users of short, snappy dictionary words as names,” point out the likes of Stripe and Block (formerly Square). We’d probably add Zip to that list. ASX-listed Dough, would fall into the following category:

2. Fun spelling mistakes

We confess that having to read aloud this Startup Daily show can lead to embarrassing moments before the penny drops, or the founder corrects us. Our only advice is to keep it simple as most people will have a hard time remembering how to search for you online if the spelling is too cute. And that could lead them to your competition.

3. Branded biotech companies

This kind of makes sense on a ‘what it says on the package’ kind of thing. Think Psylo – the psychedelic drug startup and Microbio, a bloodstream analysis company.

The latest trend is perfectly designed for the ChatGPT generation

4. A random word followed by AI

“Given how much money investors put into AI startups, it makes sense for a company to choose to come across as one,” said CrunchBase.

And we just thought they did because the Acmestartup.com domain was taken and Acmestartup.ai was still available.

But NameStormers’ Michael Carr said sticking AI on your company name is “a very short-sighted strategy,” especially when the jury is still out in the wider community on whether this kind of technology is a force for good or not.

You can read the full CrunchBase story here.