Launched in 1996 by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin under the name "Backrub", Google has become one of the leading search engines available today . At first, Google was run out of 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. Although 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 make this powerful search engine work. The key to their success lies in the strategic use of software and hardware information technologies. The IT infrastructure behind this search engine includes huge storage databases and numerous server farms to produce significant computational processing power. Google uses many equations and algorithms to determine its annual revenue, the cost of maintaining computer systems, and to track users and searches. website results. Instead of Google relying on the usual payments for advertisements such as banners or payments for "clicks" to an advertiser's site, Google did something different (Cusumano 15-17). As part of Google's business model, they created an online advertising business. They offered cost-per-click pricing for sponsored ads, so advertisers only paid a base fee, as well as based on the number of referrals to their site. Page Rank is an algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each element in a set of hyperlinked documents. Even though their IT infrastructure has changed drastically over the years, the pattern of IT system usage at Google has remained the same over all these years. . The mo...... middle of paper ......pdf>.Cusumano, Micha. “Google: what it is and what it is not”. Communications of the ACM. 48.2 (2005): 15-17. Print. Patterson, D. and Hennessy, J. (2004) Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, 3rd edition, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kauffman. Ghemawat, S., Gobioff, H. and Leung, S. (2003) “The Google File System.” Conference paper from the 19th ACM Symposium on Principles of Operating Systems, October. 2003. Dean, Jeffey and Sanjay Ghemawat. “MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters”. Operating System Design and Implementation 12 2004: 1-13. Shun-Tak Leung. “The Google File System”. The 6th Symposium on Principles of Operating Systems, 10 2003: November 20.. 2011. .