The Untold Origins of Google: How Backrub Became a Billion-Dollar Idea

In August 1998, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a one-hundred-thousand-dollar check to a company called "Google Incorporated." The only problem was, Google Incorporated didn't exist. Wait, so he wrote a check to a phantom company? He did. And the two Stanford PhD students he wrote it for, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had to scramble to actually incorporate just so they could cash it. In our episode on the secret recipes of iconic brands, we looked at stories the press releases leave out. Well, this one... this one is ALL secret recipe. Okay, so the official story is two geniuses in a garage invent the future. You're saying it was more...

accidental? Waaay more accidental. For starters, they didn't want to start a company at all. They were academics. The project wasn't even called Google at first. It was called Backrub. Backrub? Seriously? Why? Because their entire idea was based on analyzing the web's "back links." At the time, search engines like AltaVista just counted how many times a word appeared on a page. It was clumsy. Right, I remember that. You'd search for something and get a million junk results. Exactly. Page and Brin's idea was different. They thought a link from one page to another was like a vote. A page with more votes—more back links—was more important. It was a system built on reputation, not just keywords.

Huh. That's so simple, but it's also... profound. It treats the web like a community, not just a database. But if it was so good, why didn't they want to build a business? Because they thought commerce would corrupt it. They wrote a paper in 1998 basically saying that advertising-funded search engines would always be biased toward the advertisers, not the users. They even tried to sell their technology to Yahoo for a million dollars. And Yahoo said no? They said no. They didn't see the value. So Page and Brin were kind of stuck with this world-changing technology that nobody would buy and that they, themselves, didn't want to turn into a business. So that brings us back to the check.

Bechtolsheim sees a demo, loves it, and just writes a check on the spot? Pretty much. He said, "Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?" And that hundred grand sat in a desk drawer for weeks while they figured out the legal paperwork to become a real company. That's incredible. So the company was basically willed into existence by its first investor. Which brings up the most famous part of the Google origin story for me: the motto. "Don't Be Evil." Right. And everyone thinks it's this, you know, high-minded moral philosophy. It's not? It was a weapon. It was a direct, pointed attack on every other search engine at the time.

Remember that paper they wrote about advertising corrupting search? Mm-hm. "Don't Be Evil" was the marketing version of that. It was a promise. It meant, "Unlike our competitors, we won't manipulate your search results for money. Our results are pure." It wasn't about being generally virtuous; it was a specific, strategic claim about the integrity of their product. It was a business strategy disguised as a moral one. Wow. So it was less "we're saints" and more "our competitors are crooked, and we're not." That... that changes everything about how I see that phrase. It was their sharpest competitive edge. They defined "evil" as the other guy's business model.

And look at them now. The irony is staggering. A company founded on the principle that advertising corrupts search now makes almost all its money—hundreds of billions of dollars—from advertising. And that's the story nobody likes to tell. The company that exists today is the very thing its founders warned against in their own academic papers. They were reluctant entrepreneurs who built a system they believed had to be shielded from commerce. But commerce won. I mean, it didn't just win, it conquered. It always does. They set out to build a library for the world, a pure index of knowledge. But that uncashed check on a desk drawer wasn't the beginning of a library.

It was the down payment on the biggest advertising machine in human history. And you have to wonder... did they see that coming? Or did they just stop seeing it as evil?