The original name of the Google search engine before Google was BackRub.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin began the project at Stanford University in 1996 while exploring how the World Wide Web was connected. The name “BackRub” referred to the system’s analysis of backlinks—links pointing to a webpage from elsewhere on the web. Their idea was that links could function like academic citations: pages cited by important sites might themselves be important.
BackRub’s crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, initially using Page’s Stanford homepage as its starting point. The project later became the foundation for PageRank, the ranking method that helped Google produce more useful results than many search engines that relied mainly on keyword frequency.
The name Google was adopted later and was inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for 10^100. Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. PageRank was not the original name; it was the algorithm developed during the BackRub project.