BackRub, every mention
23 scenes across 2 shows · ← back to BackRub
tap a year for its mentions
Acquired 21
All-In 2
every year every show Acquired 21 All-In 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: passages where BackRub comes up on Acquired, All-In
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 21:23 David Rosenthal So, we're almost all the way there to the huge leap that would become PageRank and BackRub and ultimately Google, but there's still one missing piece.
- ▶ 25:38 David Rosenthal They decide that they're going to call the project BackRub, since it uses backlinks for ranking web pages, so they
- ▶ 25:48 David Rosenthal Spin up backrub.stanford.edu.
- ▶ 26:42 David Rosenthal I think that picture actually was on backrub.stanford.edu.
- ▶ 26:53 David Rosenthal So the text on the page says, backrub is a quote unquote web crawler, which is designed to traverse the web.
- ▶ 27:03 David Rosenthal So yeah, Ben, they're not thinking of backrub as a search engine yet.
- ▶ 27:07 David Rosenthal They're thinking of backrub as just a implementation of a crawler and the page rank algorithm.
- ▶ 27:33 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey are building Batgrub here, and I mentioned Scott, Hassan, their friend who helps code it up in Python, doesn't end up joining Google.
- ▶ 28:58 David Rosenthal So that leads them in the spring of 1997, before school is out, to start shopping this backrub technology around to the other existing search engines at the time.
- ▶ 31:12 David Rosenthal And Larry and Sergey are gonna come, work at Excite that summer, implement Backrub for their search, you know, basically make Excite into Google, and then they're gonna leave and they're gonna go back to Stanford in the fall.
- ▶ 31:33 David Rosenthal The original, you know, algorithm and then the Backrub algorithm.
- ▶ 31:39 David Rosenthal That they're demoing this test to Excite's CEO as, like, a final step to finalizing this deal, and the results are so relevant with Backrub.
- ▶ 33:18 David Rosenthal And here what Backrub is doing is they're gonna kneecap your page views.
- ▶ 33:52 David Rosenthal Nobody wants back rub.
- ▶ 34:04 David Rosenthal We couldn't get anyone interested in buying back rub.
- ▶ 34:56 David Rosenthal Backrub, uh, probably not gonna fly.
- ▶ 37:42 David Rosenthal So that 97, 98 academic years when they're building Backrub into Google, by spring quarter of that year, Google, google.com, is doing 10,000 queries a day
- ▶ 38:24 Ben Gilbert Taking Backrub, they're working in a search box, so there's now a keyword that we're ranking things for, not just arbitrarily ranking them.
- ▶ 1:17:31 David Rosenthal Backrub and then Google had actually been used for this use case.
- ▶ 3:25:08 David Rosenthal They were counter-positioned against the other search engines that existed at the time in that they, as we talked about with Excite, when they were trying to sell Backrub to Excite, the other search engines wanted you to stay on the page.
E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
- ▶ 1:20:34 Chamath Palihapitiya Because Backrub was written while Larry was a PhD there.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 2:24:44 David Rosenthal This whole back rub page rank thing.
E65: VC markup dynamics, Russia/US tensions over Ukraine, Altos Labs raises $3B, Stripe mafia & more
- ▶ 1:00:42 Chamath Palihapitiya I mean, you could have said that, you know, Google could have had 90 different algorithms, but, you know, Larry Page started with backroom.