Google’s search engine was originally called BackRub when Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed it in 1996.
The name referred to the system’s analysis of the web’s backlink structure. Page and Brin’s research treated links between pages as useful signals of importance, forming the basis of the PageRank algorithm.
BackRub initially ran on Stanford’s servers before the project became Google in 1998. The new name was inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
PageRank and BackRub are related but not interchangeable: BackRub was the search engine project’s original name, while PageRank was the ranking method. Stanford’s campus played a central role in the project’s early development.