From the pages of "The Search" by John Barrelle. Barrelle has compiled an amazing book about search, and also brought to light some legendary Google facts.
1) Larry Page's brother was a co-founder of eGroups.com, which later sold to Yahoo!for more than $500 million. Talk about sibling rivalry.
2) The project name that Page and Brin gave to the Google search project while at Stanford was BackRub. Based on the fact that one of the key search ranking of Google is based on back-links to a site.
3) At one point BackRub, which ran out of the Stanford Computer Science lab, consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.
4) Vinod Khosla introduced Google to Excite, a company that Khosla backed. Page set a price for Google at $1.6 million. As you already guessed, Excite passed.
5) Google's VC Mike Moritz was quoted as saying, "the investment was done in part to help Yahoo." Moritz was on Yahoo's board as well, and realized that Yahoo! could benefit from using Google's search technology. He was right and then some.
6) Google's first investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, famously wrote Brin and Page a $100,000 check at the end of their first meeting. What is less know is that he told Brin and Page to double the valuation of Google to calculate his equity based on his investment. Talk about serious good karma. Brin and Page had not settled on a name at the time, and decided the check should be made out to Google. The check was not deposited for a couple weeks since Google needed to incorporate first.
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