Damian Wilde/Android Authority
Google is so ubiquitous in our daily lives that it’s easy to forget that the word has only been around for a few decades. It’s one of the most powerful brands on the planet, and at this point, it’s almost synonymous with web searches.
However, when the first generation of Google’s search engine hit the market, it had a very different name. A computer science Ph.D. from Stanford University whose name is just a pair of nerds. Students may think this is a good idea.
Google’s original name was BackRub.
a brief history
Before discussing the new name, let’s first understand the origin of BackRub. Back in the mid-1990s, most search engines displayed results based primarily on keyword density. In other words, the more a specific term appears on a web page, the more likely it is to rank for that query.
This is a system that can easily be abused.
While selecting a thesis topic for his PhD, Larry Page (later joined by Sergey Brin) came up with the idea of using page links to determine the relevance and quality of that page. This allows them to provide better results with relatively simple algorithms. In many ways, this is similar to how academic articles are judged, where the impact of an article is judged by the number of citations it receives.
The first version of their search engine was released on the Stanford University website in August 1996. The ranking technology is called PageRank (after Larry Page, not the web page), but the search engine calls it BackRub. This may refer to the algorithm’s reliance on backlinks, “rubbing” backlinks to provide better results.
The results were generally superior. Although downplaying the perceived quality of the site itself (which was impossible to judge with the technology at the time), the ranking was based on the number of high-quality relevant links that the site had available.
In fact, backlinks are still widely considered to be the primary ranking factor in Google search results today.
tie
All this BackRub-ing quickly started eating into Stanford’s bandwidth. As the algorithm crawled the web and its index grew, the pair recognized the need to move to a dedicated domain.
Thankfully, this is also the time to reconsider the name. In 1997, Page and Brin’s colleague Sean Anderson suggested the name googolplex. Googol is a mathematical term coined in 1920, meaning 10 to the 100th power. In other words, a 1 followed by 100 zeros. googolplex is the power of googol, which is a ridiculously high number that is more of a concept than a useful number in mathematics.
Paradoxically, googol’s most relevant historical contribution is its role in naming the search engine Google.
So how did googol become Google? In this case, the simplest explanation is correct. This is a typo.
The name Google was originally a misspelling.
When Andreessen and Page checked the availability of the googol.com domain, he mistakenly entered google.com. Page liked the name and registered the domain name in his and Brin’s names on September 15, 1997. It has been nearly a year since Google was officially established in September 1998.
By the end of 1998, Google’s index contained 60 million pages. By 2000, this number had reached 1 billion. Recent U.S. antitrust trials show that this number has grown to 400 billion pages by 2020.
It’s an incredible amount of content and deserves praise, but nowhere near as good as Googol.