Google was originally called BackRub before the search project adopted the Google name.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing the search engine at Stanford University in 1996. The project was known as BackRub because it analyzed the web's backlinks—links pointing from one page to another—to estimate the importance of pages.
The founders registered the google.com domain in September 1997 and incorporated Google in September 1998. The name “Google” was inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders' ambition to organize enormous amounts of information.
BackRub is often confused with PageRank, but they refer to different things. BackRub was the early project name, while PageRank was the link-analysis algorithm associated with ranking web pages. Google later became a subsidiary of Alphabet when the parent company was formed in 2015.