What was Google's original name?
Quick answer
Google’s original name was BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built it in 1996 as a research project at Stanford University. The name came from how it analyzed backlinks, the links pointing to a web page, to judge how important that page was. They renamed it Google in 1997, and the company was founded in 1998.
Key facts
- Original name
- BackRub (1996)
- Founders
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin
- Domain registered
- September 15, 1997
- Company founded
- September 4, 1998
How BackRub worked
Earlier search engines ranked pages mainly by how often a search word appeared on them. Page and Brin’s idea, called PageRank, also looked at which pages linked to which. A page with many links from important pages was likely to be important itself, much like a research paper cited by many other papers.
Why “Google”?
The new name was a playful misspelling of “googol,” the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It reflected their goal of organizing the huge amount of information on the web. The company’s headquarters is called the Googleplex, after a “googolplex,” which is 10 to the power of a googol.
From dorm room to garage
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1996 | BackRub runs on Stanford’s servers |
| 1998 | Google Inc. founded; office in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California |
| 2000 | Starts selling search ads |
| 2004 | Launches Gmail and goes public |
| 2005 | Buys Android; see who created Android |
| 2006 | Buys YouTube |
| 2015 | Restructures under a new parent company, Alphabet |
Susan Wojcicki later became CEO of YouTube.
“Google” as a verb
“To google” something was added to major English dictionaries in 2006. Google has asked people to use it only for searches done with Google.
Who owns Google today?
See who owns Google. For other companies that started with different names, see what Amazon was originally called.
Searches work by finding website addresses and their numerical locations; see what DNS is.
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