Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: Before Google There Was
BackRub via Google Blogoscoped by Philipp Lenssen on 12/28/07
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, the
same approach that was then turned into PageRank.
In August 1996, according to a cached copy of the BackRub engine from
C63.be, the number of "HTML URLs" this "web search engine"
indexed was
75 million, with 30 million HTML pages downloaded by the crawler.
BackRub was written in Java and Python based "on several Sun Ultras and
Intel Pentiums running Linux."
On the backrub homepage, Larry Page thanked Scott Hassan, Alan
Steremberg and Sergey Brin for their help. Larry Page was still pretty
much the owner of the project at the point. The hand in the logo was
his own, scanned. And as the FAQ stated, if there was any question
unanswered, his email address and phone number were available for you
to directly reach him.
Later, BackRub turned into "the Google Search Engine," which may have
looked like the following in 1997, though it's quite possible the logo
back then was different than the one in the screen shot:
I'm using a gray background color as default as the HTML doesn't serve
its own color, a color set-up which wasn't too unusual in 1997, and the
white background color on the logo may be another indicator the logo
file as used by C63.be isn't the original (Google was not able to
confirm this in either direction).
As the cached copy shows, searching Stanford was still a priority over
searching the web - or at least, it was listed first. Also, Larry and
Sergey found themselves with 1.7 million crawled email addresses in
their hand back then... though utilizing those would have become quite
a different, more shady business model than the one of search ads
introduced in 2000.
[Thanks Beussery, Colin Colehour and Tony Ruscoe!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]
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