Would Google be the global behemoth it is today if it had stuck with its original – and slightly creepy – title of “BackRub”? And would teens be as inclined to knock back a Pepsi if it went by “Brad’s Drink”?

US website CNBC.com has published a list of what a number of global brands were known as before they became household names – and their original monikers may surprise you.

Silicon Valley provides some of the best examples. Stanford PhD students Jerry Yang and David Filo initially called their dot.com start-up the deeply uncatchy “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” before switching to the snappier Yahoo (an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Office Oracle).

Back in the early 20th Century, the company that was later to become IBM was known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company – a mouthful that came about following the merger of the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Company. The group subsequently rebranded as International Business Machines, later abbreviated.

Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page initially named their search engine the aforementioned “BackRub”. Interestingly, “Google” is a nod to the word googolplex, a mathematical term that describes a one followed by one hundred zeroes.

In Japan, Sony was once Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo and Nintendo was Marafuku Company and later the Nintendo Playing Cards Company before it started producing games in addition to playing cards.

Elsewhere, Pepsi-Cola was first branded as “Brad’s Drink” at its inception in the late nineteenth century, Subway was known as “Pete’s Super Submarines” and Nike was Blue Ribbon Sports.