What was Google's original name?

Google’s original name was BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin began the project in 1996 while they were doctoral students at Stanford University, developing a search system that analyzed relationships among web pages.

The name BackRub referred to the project’s focus on backlinks—the links pointing toward a particular page. Page treated those links somewhat like academic citations: a page referenced by many important pages could itself be considered more valuable. This idea became the foundation of the PageRank algorithm.

The project was not initially a formal company. Scott Hassan, who helped write early code, is often described as an unofficial third founder, although he left before Google was incorporated. The search engine’s crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, initially using Page’s Stanford home page as its starting point.

BackRub was renamed Google in 1997, a name inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google was incorporated in 1998, turning the Stanford research project into the company and search service now known worldwide.