Google Search was originally nicknamed BackRub during its development at Stanford.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin began the research project in 1996 while they were Stanford graduate students. The name BackRub referred to the system’s emphasis on backlinks: it examined which pages linked to one another and used those relationships to estimate a page’s importance.
That approach became the foundation of PageRank, the algorithm that helped distinguish Google from search engines that mainly counted how often query words appeared on a page. Scott Hassan was the project’s original lead programmer, and the early crawler began exploring the web from Page’s Stanford home page.
The project was later renamed Google, a misspelling of “googol,” the mathematical term for 10¹⁰⁰. PageRank is related to the technology, not the project’s original name, while WebCrawler was an entirely separate early search engine. Google Search’s first Stanford version appeared in 1996, and Google became a company in 1998.