FYI Google

GOOGLE was originally called BACKRUB

Like many other booming internet companies, Google has an interesting upbringing, one that is marked by a lowly beginning.


Google began as a research project in January 1996 by cofounder Larry Page, a 24-year-old Ph.D. student at Standford University. Page was soon joined by 23-year-old Sergey Brin, another Ph.D. student, forming a duo that seemed destined for failure.


According to Google's own corporate information, Brin and Page argued about every single topic they discussed. This incessant arguing, however, may have been what spurred the duo to rethink web-searching and develop a novel strategy that ranked websites according to the number of backlinks (i.e., according to the number of web pages that linked back to a web page being searched), and not based on the number of times a specific search term appeared on a given web page, as was the norm.


Because of this unique strategy, another thing you didn't know about Google is that Page and Brin nicknamed the search engine BackRub. Thankfully, in 1998, Brin and Page dropped the sexually suggestive nickname, and came up with “Google,” a term originating from a common misspelling of the word "googol," which refers to 10100.


The word “google” has become so common, it was entered into numerous dictionaries in 2006, referring to the act of using the Google search engine to retrieve information via the internet.