The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

In the Age of Darkness... before SLi... before 1 terabyte hard drives... before the iPod... yea, verily, even before Google, there was Backrub.

Led as a search engine research project by Larry Page in the computer science department at Stanford in 1996. "Backrub" might have been a reference to the algorithm that counts backlinks as votes, similarly to the current PageRank system.

As of August, 1996, Backrub's accumulated URLs had reached 75 million, with 30 million pages downloaded by Backrub's crawler. Written in Java and Python, the engine ran on Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums driving Linux.

The Backrub home page sported acknowledgments from Larry Page to the assistance of Scott Hassan, Alan Steremberg and Sergey Brin, as well as Page's personal contact information for users who had questions not addressed in Backrub's FAQ.

Backrub later became "the Google Search Engine" (pictured), where searching Stanford still took priority over searching the web. Early on, Page and Brin found that they had gathered 1.7 email addresses via crawler -- fortunately, any sinister application of these gathered addresses was shunned in favor of the search ads model adopted by Google in 2000.