The story of naming Google is a fascinating look into the early days of the internet and the academic roots of its founders. Before it became the global giant we know today, Google was initially known as “BackRub.” Here’s a deeper dive into that origin:
The Birth of BackRub
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- Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then Ph.D. students at Stanford University, began their collaborative work in 1996. Their research focused on developing a new kind of search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites.
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- “BackRub” was the name they gave to their project. This name was derived from the program’s function of analyzing “backlinks,” which are links pointing to a particular web page. In essence, the system “rubbed” or analyzed the web’s backlink structure to understand the importance of web pages.
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- This focus on backlinks was a revolutionary approach at the time. Existing search engines primarily relied on keyword frequency, which often led to irrelevant results. Page and Brin’s algorithm, which would later become the foundation of PageRank, aimed to provide more accurate and relevant search results.
The Transition to Google
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- As their project progressed, Page and Brin realized that “BackRub” wasn’t quite the catchy and memorable name they needed.
- The transition to “Google” came about through a play on the mathematical term “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- The choice of “Google” reflected the founders’ ambition to organize the vast amount of information on the web. It symbolized the sheer scale of their vision.
- It is also said that the actual spelling of Google came about because of a miss spelling of the word Googol.
- This name change marked a significant step in the evolution of their project, transforming it from an academic experiment into a burgeoning company.
Google Today
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- The name “Google” has become synonymous with online search and information retrieval. Its widespread use has even led to the word being verbed, meaning “to search for information on the internet.”
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- The origin of the name highlights the company’s commitment to handling massive amounts of data, a core principle that has driven its growth and success.
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