Which company was originally called "BackRub"?

Which company was originally called “BackRub”? Google was originally called BackRub.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the search project while they were graduate students at Stanford University. BackRub began in 1996 and used links between webpages as an important signal of a page’s importance. This approach became the foundation of PageRank, the algorithm that helped distinguish Google from many earlier search engines.

The name BackRub referred to the system’s analysis of backlinks. In 1997, the project was renamed Google, a playful variation of “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The new name suggested the founders’ ambition to organize an enormous amount of information.

Google was incorporated as a company on September 4, 1998. It is easy to confuse BackRub with an earlier search engine such as AltaVista, but BackRub was not a separate competing company that later merged into Google; it was the original name of Page and Brin’s Stanford search project.