Google Was Almost Called 'Backrub' — The Naming Story Behind the World's Biggest Search Engine

Try to imagine Googling something without using the word Google. For most people under forty, it's nearly impossible. The verb has become so embedded in everyday language that the Oxford English Dictionary officially added it in 2006. But the search engine that would one day reshape human civilization spent its earliest months with a very different name: Backrub.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing their search engine in 1996 as a Stanford University research project. The core innovation that separated their approach from existing search engines was the way it ranked pages. Rather than simply cataloguing how often a word appeared on a page, their algorithm analyzed the links pointing back to that page from other websites — what internet terminology called "backlinks." The more authoritative the sites linking to a page, the more credible the page itself was assumed to be. They called this method PageRank, and they called their crawler Backrub because it analyzed those back-links.

The Logic Behind "Backrub"

The name made perfect technical sense in 1996. The internet was a sprawling, poorly organized library where finding reliable information was genuinely difficult. Existing search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo used keyword-matching algorithms that could easily be gamed — load a page with the right words, and it would rank highly regardless of quality. Brin and Page's insight was that the web's link structure was itself a massive peer-review system. If hundreds of respected sites linked to a particular page about quantum physics, that page was probably more trustworthy than one with no links at all.

Backrub, as a name, gestured at this analysis of back-links. It was descriptive, internally logical, and entirely unsuitable for a consumer product. The name conjured images of massage parlors far more readily than information retrieval, and when the founders began thinking about taking their project beyond Stanford's servers, they knew it had to change.

From Backrub to Google

The name Google was chosen in 1997. It derives from a deliberate misspelling of "googol," the mathematical term for 10 raised to the power of 100 — a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. The choice was intentional: it signaled the founders' ambition to organize the effectively infinite amount of information available on the web. A googol is so astronomically large it exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. The name was both playful and quietly grandiose.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal but widely repeated, that the spelling error occurred during a brainstorming session when someone looked up whether the domain name "googol.com" was available and accidentally typed "google.com" instead. Finding it unclaimed, they registered it on the spot. Whether or not the misspelling was genuinely accidental, the resulting name worked: it was short, memorable, easy to spell phonetically, and completely meaningless in any existing language — making it infinitely trademarkable.

What the Name Reveals About Silicon Valley

The Backrub-to-Google transition is more than a quirky piece of tech history. It illustrates a pattern that repeats throughout the industry: transformative technology often begins with names that are purely functional, even awkward, and only acquires polish when founders realize they are building something the public will actually touch. The early internet was full of products named by engineers for engineers — names that described what the software did rather than what it felt like to use it.

Google as a name does something different. It communicates scale and ambition without explaining a single thing about link analysis or crawling algorithms. It's a word that invites you to project meaning onto it rather than waiting for it to explain itself. That shift from descriptive to evocative naming was, in retrospect, one of the company's earliest and most important design decisions. The name Backrub described a tool. The name Google described a world.