14 DAY TRIAL // As stunning as it might sound, Google is only the second name given to the Stanford students' project. Philipp Lenssen, of blogoscoped.com, discovered that its precursor back in 1996 was called "BackRub" and that it was a search engine research project that was headed by who else than Larry Page, the last Page to wed, at the computer science department at the university.
It was pretty impressive at the time, in August 1996, it had indexed 75 million URLs and its crawler had downloaded 30 million pages. Given that the Internet was not the huge web it is today, that's really a lot. BackRub was written in Java and Python based "on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux".
Larry had had help from others with the project, on the homepage he thanked Scott Hassan, Akan Steremberg and (guess who!) Sergey Brin for their help, which means that, at that time, he was pretty much the owner of the whole thing. Unlike today when you hardly ever get to see him or see footage of him, back then he gave his mail address and phone number in the FAQ for help with any and all unanswered questions one might have had about the project.
The change to Google came in 1997 and the homepage had two search boxes, one for searching Stanford and the other for searching the web, the number of search results per page was by default set to 10 and the mode of visualization was "clustering on".
Philipp Lenssen refers to a cached copy of the BackRub engine from C63.be and gives the second picture on the left that has the Google logo all weird and with nasty colors. He does say that it might not be the real deal, but it's the best piece of Google history so far. By the way, the hand in the first picture belongs to Larry Page. It was that small of a project.
