Before Google There Was BackRub  —  Google’s precursor in 1996 was called “BackRub,” a search engine research project headed by Larry Page at the computer science department at Stanford.  BackRub might have been a reference to the underlying algorithm which counts backlinks as affirmative votes …

Source:   Google Blogoscoped

Author:   Philipp Lenssen

Link:   http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-28-n47.html