Backrub is the original name of the search engine we know today as Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built it in 1996 at Stanford University. The name came from the way it worked: to rank pages, it looked at the links pointing back at them, the back links.

This article covers where the name came from, what the system actually did, and why the idea of backlinks that we still talk about today was born exactly there.

Where does the name come from?

Backrub sounds like an odd choice for a search engine, but the name came from a technical decision rather than a joke: the system worked out the value of a page not from its own content but from the links pointing at it.

The project ran at backrub.stanford.edu and was part of Larry Page's research work. Page was then involved in the university's Stanford Digital Library Project, an effort to find ways of organizing digital information.

How did search work at the time?

To understand Backrub you have to remember what search engines looked like in 1996. Back then ranking rested largely on the text of the page itself: how often the term appeared, whether it was in the title, whether it sat in the meta tags.

That approach had an obvious weakness. A page could say whatever it liked about itself. Repeating the same word hundreds of times or stuffing the meta tags with unrelated terms was enough to push a page to the top. Ranking rested on the page's own claim, and nothing verified that claim.

The idea Backrub brought

Backrub turned the question around: can we measure the value of a page by looking at what other people do about it?

A link is a small endorsement by whoever gives it. If someone links to you from their own page, they are willing to send their reader your way. All the links on the web can therefore be read as one enormous network of references.

That is exactly what Page and Brin did: they treated the web as a vast graph of pages and the links between them. This way of looking at it became the starting point for the ranking algorithm later known as PageRank.

The subtlety lies here: not all links count the same. A link from a page that has itself been linked to by many trusted pages weighs more than a link from a page nobody knows. Value flows through the network. That is the origin of what we now call authority.

Why did the name become Google?

The system improved quickly, and in September 1997 Page and his officemates worked on a new name. The one they chose was inspired by googol, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, that is 10 to the power of 100.

The choice captured the goal the founders had set themselves: to organize the world's information and make it accessible. It was a nod to the sheer size of what they meant to organize.

What remains of Backrub today?

Search engines have grown unrecognizably complex in the decades since. Hundreds of signals, layers of machine learning and language models that try to read search intent have all come into play. Yet the logic Backrub established still stands:

  • The value of a page is measured not by its own claim but by how others treat it.
  • Not all references carry the same weight; the source itself is judged too.
  • Quality decides, not quantity; hundreds of links from unrelated places do not replace a single link from a source that knows the subject.

Everything we now call off-page SEO rests on that idea. If you wonder why backlink work still sits at the center of SEO, the answer lies in that decision made in 1996.

We covered how search engines evolved from that day to this, period by period, in our article on the history of SEO.

In short

Backrub was Google's first name, in 1996, and it took that name from analyzing the back links pointing at pages. The approach moved ranking away from the page's own text and onto the web's network of references, laying the ground for PageRank. The name became Google in 1997, inspired by the word googol, but the idea behind it never changed.