You probably use it fifty times a day without thinking, but Google wasn't always the giant colorful G we know now. It had a much weirder, almost creepy name. What was Google originally called? Backrub. Seriously. Imagine telling your boss you need to "Backrub" the quarterly earnings report or asking a friend to "Backrub" the nearest pizza place. It sounds less like a tech revolution and more like a spa day gone wrong.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford grad students, weren't trying to be funny. They were trying to solve a massive math problem. In the mid-90s, the web was a chaotic mess of unorganized pages. Most search engines back then, like AltaVista or Excite, just looked for how many times a word appeared on a page. If you typed "goldfish," the site that wrote "goldfish" a thousand times ranked first. It was easy to game. It was also pretty useless.
The Logic Behind the Backrub Name
The name Backrub actually made a lot of sense if you were a computer scientist in 1996. Larry Page had this realization: the entire web is built on links. He treated a link from one page to another like a "vote." If a lot of people link to your site, your site must be important.
Because the search engine's primary job was to crawl through these "backlinks" to determine the importance of a website, Page and Brin dubbed it Backrub. It was literally rubbing the back of the internet to see how the muscles—the links—connected everything together.
They ran the engine on Stanford’s servers for over a year. It eventually took up so much bandwidth that the university’s IT department started getting nervous. At one point, Backrub was indexing about 75 million URLs. That sounds tiny today, but in 1996, it was a massive feat of engineering.
Why the Pivot to Google?
By 1997, the creators realized that if they wanted to turn this into a real business, they needed a name that didn't sound like a massage parlor. They wanted something that represented the scale of the information they were organizing.
The story goes that Larry Page was in an office at Stanford with some other graduate students, including Sean Anderson. They were brainstorming names that implied a massive amount of data. Anderson suggested the word "googolplex." A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It's a number so large it’s practically incomprehensible.
Larry liked the shorter version: Googol.
Here is the kicker: the name Google is actually a typo. When Anderson searched to see if the domain name was available, he accidentally typed "https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com" instead of "https://www.google.com/search?q=googol.com." Larry liked the misspelling even better. He registered the domain on September 15, 1997.
Think about that. One of the most valuable brands in human history exists because a grad student didn't know how to spell a math term. It’s a very human moment in a very data-driven story.
The Tech That Made It Stick
It wasn't just the name change that worked. It was the PageRank algorithm. Named after Larry Page—though the pun on "web page" was definitely intentional—this was the "secret sauce" that actually made Google better than everyone else.
Most people don't realize that in the early days, Google’s homepage was incredibly sparse because the founders didn't know much HTML. They just wanted a fast interface. While other portals like Yahoo were trying to be "destinations" filled with news, weather, and horoscopes, Google was just a box.
It was a utility.
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You went there to leave.
That was a radical concept in 1998. Most companies wanted "stickiness." Google wanted efficiency. By focusing on the math of the "backrub"—the relationships between pages—they provided results that actually felt like what you were looking for.
From a Garage to the Alphabet
By the time Google officially incorporated in September 1998, they were operating out of Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. Susan would later become the CEO of YouTube, showing just how tight-knit that early Silicon Valley circle was.
They had a $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Funny enough, Andy wrote the check to "Google Inc." before the company even legally existed. Larry and Sergey had to hurry up and incorporate just so they could deposit the money.
The transition from the name Backrub to Google marked the transition from a research project to a global phenomenon. If they had stayed with the original name, it’s hard to imagine the company surviving the dot-com crash. Brand identity matters. "Google" felt playful, modern, and expansive. "Backrub" felt... well, a bit too personal.
Real-World Takeaways for Your Brand
If you are looking at the history of what Google was originally called, there are some pretty heavy lessons for modern entrepreneurs and creators.
- Function over form initially: Backrub was a great tool before it had a great name. Don't let a "bad" name stop you from building a superior product.
- Pivot when necessary: Larry and Sergey weren't married to their first idea. They recognized that "Backrub" wouldn't scale as a consumer brand.
- Embrace the accidents: The fact that "Google" is a typo is a reminder that perfection isn't required for success. Sometimes the mistake is better than the original plan.
- Scalability is a mindset: Choosing a name based on a mathematical term (googol) signaled that they intended to organize all the world's information, not just some of it.
If you’re curious about how this history affects your digital life today, take a look at your own browser’s history or your site's SEO. You’re still essentially dealing with the legacy of PageRank. The "backlinks" that the Backrub name was based on are still the most important factor in how websites rank in 2026.
To see this in action, you can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to look at your own "backlinks." Every time you see that list of links pointing to your site, remember that you’re looking at the digital "rub" that started it all. If you want to improve your own search presence, start by auditing those links to see who is "voting" for your content.
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Next Steps for Deep Diving into Search History:
Check the Stanford University Digital Library archives to see the original 1996 "Backrub" papers. Seeing the raw screenshots of the first crawler helps you appreciate how far the UI has come from its humble, grey-background beginnings.