Google, once called Backrub, got its name due to a spelling error
Incorporated on September 4, 1998, Google began as a research project in 1996 by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The search engine was initially named 'Backrub' as it checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. The name was eventually changed to 'Google', coming from the misspelling of 'googol', which denotes 1 followed by 100 zeros.