From the garage to the Googleplex
BackRub was an early search engine from the 1990s which is now regarded as the predecessor of the Google search engine. It was personally developed and operated by Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Backrub
BackRub was an early search engine from the 1990s which is now regarded as the predecessor of the Google search engine. It was personally developed and operated by Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Contents
- 1 The roots of Backrub
- 2 Development
- 3 Growth
- 4 The technical foundation of BackRub
- 5 Importance for search engine optimization
- 6 Web Links
The roots of Backrub
Work on the BackRub search engine began in 1996. It was a research project of Larry Page, who studied at Stanford University at the time and was part of the team that worked on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). This project had set itself the goal of developing technologies which could create a universal digital library. As part of his thesis, Larry Page took up the issue of linking. His reflections on understanding link structure as a huge graph, later led to the development of the still significant PageRank algorithm.
Development
Page named his project BackRub. Later, Sergey Brin, who had also worked on a similar study and research area, joined Page and from then on supported him in the development of the search engine.
First, the search engine returned a list of backlinks, whose ranking was designed depending on their importance. The two developers quickly realized that a search engine that would be based on PageRank would yield better results than existing technologies. At that time, search engines were exclusively fixated on how frequently a searched keyword appeared on a web page. Page and Brin wanted to build BackRub on the principle that the websites which had the most links would be the most relevant.
Growth
After Backrub began indexing websites in March 1996, the index grew very quickly. By August 1996, some 75 million pages had been indexed which occupied a total of 207 GB when combined. Around 30 million HTML pages were among them, but even more e-mail addresses. In the year Google was created, Backrub had already indexed 25 million pages. Google Inc., was finally established on September 4, 1998 and the renaming of the search engine from Backrub to Google was decided.
The technical foundation of BackRub
The BackRub search engine was based on Java and Python. Page ran it on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums with a Linux operating system. The primary database was at that time on a Sun Ultra II with a hard disk space of 28 GB. Until 2007, BackRub ran on servers at Stanford University. After that, Page and Brin operated their servers for a few months in the garage of their friend, Susan Wojcicki, who is now in a senior position at Google Inc. Once these premises became too small, the BackRub servers moved for the second time. Besides Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were also involved in the technical development of BackRub.
Importance for search engine optimization
With the search engine Backrub, Page and Brin laid the foundation for search engine optimization as it is known today. For many years, the targeted building of links was an elementary building block of SEO to improve ranking. Backrub, or more specifically their founders, can be credited with the fact that the number of external, incoming links influences ranking.
Web Links
From the garage to the Googleplex
The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around.
By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.
Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google (phew). The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Over the next few years, Google caught the attention of not only the academic community, but Silicon Valley investors as well. In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. was officially born. With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and former CEO of YouTube). Clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpet set the scene for those early days and late nights. (The tradition of keeping things colorful continues to this day.)
Even in the beginning, things were unconventional: from Google’s initial server (made of Lego) to the first “Doodle” in 1998: a stick figure in the logo announcing to site visitors that the entire staff was playing hooky at the Burning Man Festival. “Don’t be evil” captured the spirit of our intentionally unconventional methods. In the years that followed, the company expanded rapidly — hiring engineers, building a sales team, and introducing the first company dog, Yoshka. Google outgrew the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters (a.k.a.“The Googleplex”) in Mountain View, California. The spirit of doing things differently made the move. So did Yoshka.
The relentless search for better answers continues to be at the core of everything we do. Today, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globe, from YouTube and Android to Gmail and, of course, Google Search. Although we’ve ditched the Lego servers and added just a few more company dogs, our passion for building technology for everyone has stayed with us — from the dorm room, to the garage, and to this very day.
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