Research project "BackRub”After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. He along with Brin, started work on a research project nicknamed "BackRub" to devise a method for determining the number of Web pages linked to any one given page. At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised of an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. Since the resources required to crawl such a huge number of documents were way beyond the usual bounds of a student project, so Page began building out his crawler. Soon, Page found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones.