Google Was Nearly Called BackRub

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin created what we now know Google back in 1996, they initially called it BackRub. The name was a nod to the way the search engine analyzed the web’s “back links” to determine how important a site was. A year later, Page and Brin decided they needed to upgrade to a name that indicated just how much data they were indexing. Eventually, they came up with “Google,” a take on the number “googolplex,” which is the digit 1 followed by 10100 zeroes.