How Google Started Google has become an integral part of our daily lives. But did you know? The word that we are using in one form or another daily has only been around for a few decades. Today, Google has become synonymous with the search engine.
However, when Google first went public, it had a different name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students studying computer science at Stanford University, were the only ones who felt the name was moving.
A Brief History of Google
How did Google come into the limelight while working on BackRub? In the 1990s, only such information appeared more in the search engine, about which more information was kept on the webpage. That is, the search results were visible based on the keyword density. That is, if a word is placed more than once on a web page, the page prepared for that word would be ranked.
Due to this, the content creator used to keep irrelevant content to rank the page. In that case, users could not find the information they were looking for easily.
Larry Page put the first version of his search engine on the Stanford website in 1996. In other words, ‘back rub’ was placed as a category on Stanford’s website. At that time, the way to rank a website was called Page Rank, and they named the search engine ‘BackRub’.
The word ‘back’ refers to a backlink, while rub refers to the word ‘rubbing’. In other words, the name of the search engine was given as ‘BackRub’ because it ranks based on page backlinks. Even then, technology made it a challenge to rank quality pages. Even now, only the webpages with more backlinks are ranked on Google.
A journey from back rub to Google
Back Rub‘ was placed on Stanford’s website. On the other hand, this search engine used to consume more bandwidth to rank the page. Algorithms started to consume more bandwidth while crawling and indexing the web. Then Larry Page and his friend Sergey Brin realized that a separate domain should be created for the search engine.
Around 1997, Larry Page’s friend Sean Edders suggested the domain name Googolplex. Google is a mathematical word. It means 10 to the power of 100. In other words, having 100 zeros behind one was called ‘Googol’. They planned to keep this name when the number of web pages was in the millions.
Larry Page got this name by mistake. He registered the domain name in the name of himself and his friend Brin on September 15, 1997. About a year later, Google was officially established as a company.
By the end of 1998, six million pages were indexed on Google. By the year 2000, that number had increased to one billion. According to various reports, the number of indexed pages has increased to 400 billion by the year 2020.