Why Backlinks Made BackRub Different
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were exploring a way to rank web pages by looking beyond the words on each page. Their early search engine, BackRub, examined backlinks: links pointing from one page to another. The name captured the central clue the system used—who was linking to whom.
A link could function like a recommendation. If many pages pointed to one site, that was evidence it might matter; a link from an already important page could count for more than one from an obscure corner of the web. This turned the web’s own connections into a signal for estimating a page’s importance, rather than treating every matching page as equally useful.
From a Research Project to Google
BackRub ran on Stanford’s servers for more than a year while Page and Brin developed the system. Its approach required collecting and analyzing links across a rapidly growing web, making the project a substantial computing task as well as a search-engine experiment.
The founders later renamed it Google, a name associated with the immense scale of information they hoped to organize. But the original name offers a clearer glimpse of the search engine’s early design: its distinctive idea was to read the web as a network of endorsements. That shift helped make the structure between pages—not just the text on them—a tool for deciding what searchers should see first.
