Chinese Surfers had been pronouncing the unfamiliar "Google" as "gougou" or "gugou," among other variants - meaning "doggy" and "old hound." An easier-to-pronounce name is just one of the reasons why rival Baidu has been more popular than Google in China.

That's why the company tweak

ed its iconic name yesterday as it opened a new engineering center in Beijing. Google renamed itself "Gu Ge" (pronounced "goo-guh"), which translates as "song of the harvest of grain." Google officials said the new name projected "the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way."