谷歌 : gǔgē - Google

Unlike Microsoft, Google uses a phonetic translation: 谷歌 gǔgē . Literally this means "valley-song". Well, I guess Google has been singing a pretty happy song in The Valley (Silicon) the past few years...

"Google" is derived from "googol" (the number 10¹⁰⁰). I'd heard they couldn't get the domain name, but Google's official history says they had to name the company that because their first investor wrote his check out to "Google, Inc." (Sounds a bit too amusing to be true).

The Chinese translation for "googol" is (I think) 古高尔(gǔgāoěr) another phonetic. But it's pretty likely the English word was made up just for the funny sound of it (not exactly an onomatopoeia), or perhaps the three "oh"s represent the three zeros in 10¹⁰⁰.

• 谷歌 - www.google.cn
• Wikipedia: Censorship by Google in China
• Google: A new approach to China