Alphabet originally named its search engine BackRub before it became Google.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search engine while they were doctoral students at Stanford University. The name referred to the system's analysis of the web's “back links,” which helped rank pages by examining connections between them.
Google was incorporated in 1998, and the search engine soon adopted the Google name. “Google” itself is a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 10¹⁰⁰. The company later reorganized under Alphabet Inc. in 2015, making Alphabet the parent company of Google and several other businesses.
A common mix-up is confusing BackRub with PageRank. PageRank was the ranking algorithm associated with the early search engine, while BackRub was the search engine's original name. Google Search remains Alphabet's best-known product and a major source of the company's global influence.