Google’s search engine project was originally called BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed it at Stanford University in 1996 while studying how to organize information on the World Wide Web.
The name referred to the system’s analysis of the web’s backlinks. Instead of relying only on the words on a page, the project examined links pointing to pages, treating links as signals that could help estimate importance. This research led to the PageRank algorithm.
The project was renamed Google in 1997. The new name was a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize a vast amount of information.
BackRub is sometimes confused with PageRank, but they are not the same thing. BackRub was the project’s original name, while PageRank was the ranking method developed within it.