Before it became Google, the search project developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was known as BackRub, a name used during its early development at Stanford in the mid‑1990s when the founders were researching new ways to rank web pages by importance.
Origins
BackRub began as a research project that indexed the web and analysed the network of links between pages to determine relevance, an approach that differed from earlier search engines which relied more heavily on on‑page factors.
Name and meaning
The project was later renamed Google, a play on the mathematical term \"googol\" (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros), reflecting the founders’ ambition to organise an immense quantity of information online.
Backlink algorithm
BackRub’s core innovation was to use backlinks as a proxy for a page’s authority: pages linked to by many important sites were ranked higher, a concept that evolved into the PageRank algorithm underpinning early Google search results.
Timeline
The system was developed while Page and Brin were at Stanford in the late 1990s and the name change to Google occurred as the project moved from prototype to a public search service and commercial venture.
Legacy
What began as BackRub became the foundation for one of the most influential internet companies, transforming web search by prioritising link structure and inspiring countless advances in information retrieval and web indexing.
Quick related facts
- Original name: BackRub
- Founders: Larry Page; Sergey Brin
- Core idea: analyse backlinks to rank pages
- Renamed: Google, inspired by \"googol\"