It is hard to imagine a world where you don’t "Google" something. We use it as a verb, a noun, and basically a digital safety net for every random thought that pops into our heads at 3:00 AM. But if Larry Page and Sergey Brin hadn't had a change of heart back in the late nineties, you wouldn't be Googling anything. You’d be "BackRubbing" it.
Yeah. Seriously.
Google's original name was BackRub. It sounds more like a questionable massage parlor or a niche spa service than a world-dominating tech titan. But in 1996, inside the cramped dorm rooms of Stanford University, it made perfect sense to two PhD students trying to solve the biggest problem on the internet.
The weird logic behind the name BackRub
When Larry Page first started poking around the web, he wasn't trying to build a multi-billion dollar company. He was just a grad student looking for a dissertation topic. He got this idea to treat the entire World Wide Web as a giant graph. He wanted to see which pages linked to which other pages.
Most people don't realize that early search engines were pretty terrible. They mostly just counted how many times a word appeared on a page. If you searched for "billabong," the site that spammed the word a thousand times would rank first, even if the content was total garbage.
Larry had a different theory. He figured that if a lot of people linked to a specific page, that page must be important. It’s like academic citations; if a paper is cited a lot, it’s probably a big deal.
So, he built a web crawler. It started on his own Stanford home page and worked its way outward. Because the system was specifically designed to crawl through and analyze "backlinks"—the links pointing back to a specific site—he gave the project the nickname BackRub.
It was a functional name. Technical. A bit literal. And honestly, kind of creepy in retrospect.
👉 See also: The Truth About the Apple Store on Chagrin (Eton Chagrin Boulevard)
How Sergey Brin entered the picture
Sergey Brin wasn't actually part of the project at first. He was the guy assigned to show Larry around campus when Larry first visited Stanford. According to company lore, they disagreed on almost everything during that first meeting. They were both incredibly smart, opinionated, and apparently, a little bit argumentative.
Eventually, they found common ground in the massive amounts of data Larry was pulling. By 1996, the BackRub crawler was eating up nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth. It was a beast. They were running it on a collection of cheap, "borrowed" computers housed in Larry’s dorm room. They even famously built a server casing out of Duplo blocks because they were cheap and modular.
For over a year, if you wanted to use their high-quality search results, you went to backrub.stanford.edu.
The accidental birth of "Google"
By 1997, it was becoming clear that BackRub was too big for a dorm room. It was also clear that the name was... not great. They needed something that represented the scale of what they were doing.
The story goes that Larry Page was sitting in an office with a few other graduate students, including Sean Anderson. They were brainstorming names that implied a massive amount of data. Anderson suggested "googolplex," which is a mind-bogglingly large number (1 followed by a googol of zeros). Larry liked it but wanted to shorten it to just "googol."
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was the perfect metaphor for organizing a seemingly infinite amount of information.
Here is where the "human" part of the story kicks in. Sean Anderson sat down at his computer to check if the domain name was available. But he didn't type "https://www.google.com/search?q=googol.com." He accidentally typed google.com.
🔗 Read more: VR Training News Today: Why Most Companies Are Still Getting It Wrong
Larry liked the misspelling better. It was cleaner. It looked better on a screen. Within a few hours, they registered the domain.
The $100,000 mistake that stuck
There is another layer to the name change that involves a guy named Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
In August 1998, before Google was even an incorporated company, the duo gave Andy a demo on a porch in Palo Alto. He was so impressed that he pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check for $100,000 on the spot.
The problem? He made the check out to "Google Inc."
At that moment, Google Inc. didn't exist. There was no bank account under that name. To cash the check, Larry and Sergey had to quickly incorporate the company and legally adopt the name. The name "BackRub" was officially dead.
Why the name change actually saved the company
Imagine trying to tell a friend, "I'll BackRub that recipe for you later." It just doesn't work.
The transition from BackRub to Google is one of the most successful rebrands in history, mostly because it moved the brand from a technical description (crawling backlinks) to a visionary concept (unlimited information).
The name "Google" feels playful. It’s easy to say. It sounds like a word a toddler might make up, which makes it approachable despite the terrifyingly complex math happening behind the search bar.
What we can learn from the BackRub era
If you're building something today—whether it's a blog, a side hustle, or the next big app—don't get too attached to your first "functional" name.
- Focus on the core value first: Larry and Sergey spent a year perfecting the PageRank algorithm while the project was still called BackRub. The tech mattered more than the label.
- Listen to the "misses": Sometimes a typo or a friend's suggestion is better than your original vision.
- Scale your brand with your ambition: BackRub was a project name. Google was a company name.
Next steps for your own research
If you want to see what the internet looked like when it was still called BackRub, you can actually find archived versions of the original Stanford pages. Take a look at the Stanford Digital Library Project archives or read the original paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by Brin and Page. It’s surprisingly readable and explains exactly why those backlinks—the "backrubs"—were so important to the future of the internet.
Check your own brand names too. If they sound more like a spa treatment than a solution, it might be time for your "googol" moment.
Source References:
- Vise, David A. (2005). The Google Story.
- Stanford University Archives: The History of Google.
- Battelle, John (2005). The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.