Google’s original search engine was called BackRub before it became Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub at Stanford University in the late 1990s while studying how to improve web search.
The name referred to the system’s analysis of the web’s backlinks, or links pointing from one page to another. This approach helped the project estimate the importance of pages by examining the structure of the web, not just matching search terms.
BackRub was later renamed Google in 1997, and the Google company was incorporated in 1998. The new name was inspired by “googol,” a one followed by 100 zeroes. It suggested the enormous scale of information the search engine was intended to organize.
BackRub is sometimes confused with PageRank, but they were not the same thing. BackRub was the search project’s early name, while PageRank was the ranking method associated with Larry Page. Google Search eventually grew into the company’s central product and the basis for its advertising business.