What was Google called in the 90s?

Before Google Was Google: The Backrub Era

Long before “Google” became a verb, the tech giant had a much more humble—and slightly odd—name: Backrub. In 1996, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, they launched a research project aimed at understanding how the web truly worked. Their idea? Analyze the connections between websites by looking at backlinks—the links from other pages pointing to a given site.

This focus on backlinks gave the project its quirky name: Backrub. It wasn’t flashy, but it was descriptive. The algorithm crawled the web, studied how pages linked to one another, and used that data to rank results by relevance and authority. Simple, yet revolutionary.

Page ran the operation from room 360 in the Gates Computer Science Building, sharing the space with fellow grad students—including Sean. The setup was modest, to say the least: a far cry from the global tech empire Google would become. But even in those early days, the potential was obvious. Backrub quickly gained traction across campus as students and faculty alike began using it to find information more efficiently.

By 1997, the duo decided a rebrand was in order. “Backrub” didn’t exactly sound like a world-changing company. Legend has it they eventually settled on “Google”—a play on the word “googol,” the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros, symbolizing the vastness of the web. The domain google.com was registered in September 1997, quietly marking the end of the Backrub chapter.

So, before it was synonymous with search, Google was just a clever idea with an awkward name—proof that even the biggest innovations often start with a little humor and a lot of curiosity.