Step 1 : Introduction to the question "Before taking its current name, which company was originally named BackRub?"
...But this certainly wasn't the first time the duo had experimented with language. Back in 1996, before Google even existed as an entity, Page and Brin ... Google was originally called BackRub - Gizmodo
Google was originally called BackRub. The domain Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. But before that, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had another name for their search engine: They called it BackRub.
Step 2 : Answer to the question "Before taking its current name, which company was originally named BackRub?"
Google:
Google was originally named "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997.