Why the search engine was called BackRub
In 1996, Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search project that treated links between web pages as clues to their importance. Its name, BackRub, referred to the “backlinks” pointing toward a page—not to anything the software did to people. The name sounds unsettling now because “rub” has a more bodily, personal meaning in everyday speech.
Links became a way to rank the web
A simple search could find pages containing the words someone typed, but that alone did not show which results were worth seeing first. BackRub’s distinctive idea was to examine the web’s link structure: a link from one page to another could act like a recommendation. By analyzing those connections, the system aimed to rank pages by their importance, rather than merely matching words.
That approach made the project’s name a description of its underlying method. The web was not just a collection of documents; it was a network whose connections could help reveal which documents mattered.
From BackRub to Google
The project was later renamed Google, a playful reference to a googol—the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The new name pointed toward the vast scale of information the founders hoped to organize. BackRub, by contrast, captured the more specific technical insight that helped set the search engine apart: to understand a page, look at the pages pointing back to it.
