In 1996, two Stanford PhD students built a search engine and named it after a back massage. Three years later, that name was gone, replaced by a misspelling that would outlive both of them in everyday speech. The story of how BackRub became Google is not a story about branding consultants or focus groups. It is a story about a typo, a very large number, and two founders who recognized that the right name could carry an ambition the old one never could.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working within the Stanford Digital Library Project, a research effort to better understand how web pages linked to one another. As part of his thesis, Page became interested in the structure of these connections — specifically, the idea that a webpage’s importance could be measured by counting its “backlinks,” the links pointing to it from other pages. This concept became the foundation of what would later be known as Page Rank, one of the core algorithms behind Google’s search engine. Page named the project BackRub, a direct reference to this backlink analysis. According to Stanford’s own historical account, the original BackRub search engine ran on university servers, built using Java and Python. By August 1996, it had already indexed around 75 million pages, totaling 207 gigabytes of data.
BackRub worked, and it worked well, drawing early attention from people at Stanford. But as Page and Brin prepared to formalize the project into an actual company, the name became a problem. BackRub described the technical mechanism behind the search engine, not its ambition. It wasn’t built to represent a company aiming to organize the entirety of the world’s information; it was named for a single clever technique.
The replacement name came from a brainstorming session, and the most reliably documented version of this story comes directly from Stanford, in an account hosted on the university’s own graphics department website, sourced from people who worked alongside Page and Brin in Stanford’s Gates Computer Science Building. During that session, a colleague named Sean Anderson suggested the word “googolplex,” an enormous number. Larry Page responded by shortening it to “googol,” referring to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, a figure representing an almost incomprehensibly large quantity. Anderson then checked whether the domain was available for registration, but misspelled the word as “google.com.” He found it available, and Larry Page registered the domain on September 15, 1997. That misspelling became the company’s permanent name.
The choice, even if it originated from a typo, fit the founders’ ambitions with striking precision. “Googol” symbolized the vast, almost limitless scale of information the founders wanted their search engine to organize and make accessible, a far more expansive promise than anything the name BackRub could carry. Google Inc. was officially established on September 4, 1998, and the Google name was filed for trademark that same year.
BackRub named a method. Google named a mission. One described how the search engine worked. The other described what it was meant to do. That distinction choosing a name that reflects the scale of a company’s ambition rather than the mechanics of how it operates is the reason one name stayed inside a research lab while the other became a verb in dozens of languages.