Backrub was a search engine from the 1990s considered to be the predecessor to the Google search engine and was personally developed and operated by Google founder Larry Page.
The origins of Backrub
Work on the Backrub search engine began in 1996. It was a Larry Page research project, who was studying at Stanford University at the time and was part of the team that worked on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). This project consisted of developing technologies that would allow the creation of a universal digital library. As part of his thesis, Larry Page addressed the topic of relationship. His reflections on understanding link structure as a huge graph later led to the development of the still significant PageRank algorithm.
Development
Page called his project Backrub. Soon after, Sergey Brin, who had also worked in an equivalent study and research area, joined Page and has since supported him in the development of the search engine.
First, the search engine returned a list of backlinks, the ranking of which was designed in depending on its importance. The two developers quickly realized that a PageRank-based search engine would produce better results than existing technologies. At the time, search engines were exclusively obsessed with how often a searched keyword appeared on a web page. Page and Brin wanted to build Backrub on the principle that the websites would be the most relevant and with the most links.
Increase
After Backrub started indexing websites in March 1996, the index grew very fast. As of August 1996, some 75 million pages had been indexed, which combined took up 207GB of memory. About 30 million HTML pages were among them, but still more email addresses. In the year of Google's inception, Backrub had already indexed 25 million pages. Google Inc. was in conclusion established on September 4, 1998 and it has been decided to change the name of the search engine from Backrub to Google.
The Backrub technical foundation
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 main database was at the time on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB hard drive space. Until 2007, Backrub ran on Stanford University servers. After that, Page and Brin operated their servers for a few months in the garage of their friend, Susan Wojcicki. Today he occupies a managerial position in the search engine of Google Inc. After these premises had become too small, the Backrub servers were moved a second time. Along with 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 at this time. For many years, link building was an SEO staple to boost rankings. Backrub, or more specifically its founders, can give credit that the number of external and incoming links influences ranking.
Web Links
