Launched in 1996 by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin as "Backrub", Google has become known as one of the leading search engines available today. At first Google was in a garage until 1999, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought their first office, and in 2001 they opened their first international office in Tokyo. While Google is known for making it easy for anyone to search for any topic and find their answer, it takes a lot of work behind the scenes to run this powerful search engine. The key to their success has been based on the strategic use of both software and hardware information technologies. The computing infrastructure behind this search engine includes massive storage databases and numerous server farms to produce significant computational processing power. Google uses many equations and algorithms to calculate annual revenue, IT system maintenance costs, and keep up with users and searches. results from the website. Instead of relying on the usual payments for ads like banners or payments for “click-throughs” to an advertiser's site, Google did something different (Cusumano 15-17). As part of Google's business model they have created a business with online advertising. They proposed cost-per-click pricing for sponsored ads so that advertisers only pay a base fee and for the number of referrals to their site. Page Rank is an algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each element of a set of hyperlinked documents. Even though their IT infrastructure has changed dramatically over the years, Google's IT system usage model has remained the same throughout those years. The mo...... middle of paper......pdf>.Cusumano, Micha. “Google: What It Is and What It Isn't.” Communications of the ACM. 48.2(2005): 15-17. Print.Patterson, D., & Hennessy, J. (2004) Computer Organization and Design: TheHardware/Software Interface, 3rd edition. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kauffman. Ghemawat, S., Gobioff, H. and Leung, S. (2003) “The Google File System Conference paper on The 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October.” 2003. Dean, Jeffey and Sanjay Ghemawat. “MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters.” Shun-Tak Leung. "The Google File System". The 6th Symposium on Principles of Operating Systems, November 20. 2011. .