Larry Page and Sergey Brin are two computer science graduate students who met at Stanford University in 1995. On the servers, at Stanford, they begin a new research project to systematically check backlinks on websites in order to determine their authority. They call the project BackRub and the original search engine result page includes the data the website has been crawled, the name of the website and the number of backlinks.
In about a year, BackRub quickly grew in popularity and the project is moved on its own hosting infrastructure outside of the realm of Stanford.