Google's original name was surprisingly physical
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began collaborating on a search engine at Stanford University. Before settling on the mathematical term Google, they named their creation BackRub. This bizarre, slightly uncomfortable name was chosen because the search engine analyzed the web's back links to estimate the importance of individual pages. Thankfully, they rebranded the system a year later.
A Research Project in Stanford's Computer Labs
In the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web was expanding at a pace that far outstripped the tools available to navigate it. At Stanford University, two computer science doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began collaborating on a research initiative exploring the mathematical properties of the web's growing link architecture. Page was interested in the structure of web links as a massive graph, theorizing that examining the connections between pages could reveal far more than merely scanning text.
When their collaboration began in 1996, the project needed a working title. The system they engineered was christened BackRub. While the moniker sounds oddly tactile or suggestive to modern ears, to Page and Brin it was an entirely literal description of the underlying computational mechanism: the software traversed and analyzed the web's backlinks to evaluate the significance of individual web pages.
The Mechanics of the Backlink Analysis
To understand why BackRub was named after links, one must understand how 1990s search engines operated. Early search systems functioned like simple digital card catalogs, indexing pages based on keyword density. If a user searched for a particular term, the engine looked for documents where that word appeared most frequently. This approach was easily manipulated and frequently returned low-quality or irrelevant results, as web authors could repeat terms endlessly to artificially boost their rankings.
Page and Brin approached the problem through the lens of academic citation. In scholarly research, a paper cited by dozens of other papers is generally considered more authoritative than one cited only once. BackRub applied this principle to the internet, treating every hyperlink pointing to a page as a vote of confidence. The algorithm did not just count incoming links; it also evaluated the authority of the linking pages themselves, creating a recursive ranking system that formed the foundation of what became PageRank.