The new search engine, at first called BackRub, was an object of some secrecy. Spurred by Page’s obsession with Tesla, who unwittingly gave away his inventions by sharing them with others, Page and Brin zealously guarded the algorithms that created Page Rank. But as PhD. Candidates, they were expected to present their work, so to satisfy Stanford’s academic requirements. They agreed to deliver a paper in January 1998. At the time it wasn’t clear whether they wanted to be entrepreneurs or academics. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page said. “We wanted to finish school,” as their fathers had. Page remembered the words of Stanford professor Jeffrey Ullman, who urged them to leave the university. “You guys can always come back and finish your Ph.D.’s if you don’t succeed.” This argument ultimately proved persuasive, but not before the paper was delivered.

The database they discussed consisted of 24 million Web pages; a typical search took one to ten seconds. They chose the name Google, or 10 and fits with our goal of building very large –scale search engines.” (Actually, they wanted to name it Googol but that domain name was taken. They also thought of the what box sounded like Wet box, which sounded like some sort of porn site.”) Their paper stated that their search technology offered “two important features that help it produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank. . . . Second, Google utilizes” link—518 million hyperlinks at the time—to make maps that “Allow rapid calculations to describe how they approximated “a page’s importance or quality.”

Excerpted from Page 39-40 of ‘Googled: The end of the world as we know it’ by Ken Auletta