Searching Google by Google

Searching Google by Google

Part One

If you're gonna look at any company, one thing you wanna look at is the leadership. And not since Microsoft, really, has the technology world seen anything quite like this. The founders 2 of Google are almost famous, practically 1)icons!
  
34-year-old Larry Page and thirty-year-old Sergey Brin, created Google in graduate school. In 2000, they 2)made their first big splash at the Internet industry's 3)Webby Awards. Tiffany Schlain, who runs the Webby's, says, "Don't bet against these guys."

Schlain: I think the power of Sergey and Larry is they can take a complex idea and make it simple.
  
So who are the real Google guys? The 4)brash Internet 5)whiz kids who aren't afraid to take risks? Or the new 6)buttoned-down corporate 4 executives: and which is the better investment? Mitchell Kapor says the jury is still out and he's known the google guys for six years. Kapor was the founder 1 of 7)Lotus, which was the Google of its day, in 1982. He first got to know the Google guys when they were a 8)start up.

Kapor: Even at the time when they didn't have the experience to 9)warrant self-confidence; they just felt like they were gonna do things the way they wanted do things, and the rest of the world could adjust.
  
But now he says that very 10)trait could be a problem.

Kapor: They have to show that they can listen to their customer and adapt and change and strike a fair 11)bargain.

Part Two

Sergey Brin is co-founder of Google in Mountain View, California. He joins us by phone from his office. Now, how does a search engine search?

There are three parts to the search engine. The first part is what we call "crawling" and that's actually where we go out and we fetch the pages. And it's much like you would serf the web, you know, click from link to link, page to page—except we have thousands of computers doing this and they all do it as quickly as they possibly can. Then once we have all these pages, of which there are billions of, what we do is we 12)index them. And then, the final step is searching which is what somebody like one of those hundreds of millions of users comes to us with a 13)query 5 and we access the index and we try to figure out what are the best pages to answer that query.       

How much 14)computing 6 power? What are the computers sitting? Are there a giant 15)mainframe sitting there? Or what do you use?

So, we actually use kind-of PC's which are not unlike the one that you might have at your home, only we have tens of thousands of them.

No kidding?

And they're spread around the world in different data centers.

Tell us about the economics, you make a lot of money don't you, at Google?

Well, I'd like to think we're a successful business. One of the great successes, one is the 16)AdWords program, which is for advertisers and we have over 100 thousand of them.
 
Did anybody expect that you...did you expect that this would be so successful so soon?

Um, you know, when we formed the business plan originally I 17)jotted down some numbers on a 18)spreadsheet and, it only went a few years out, but that you know, it sort of projected 19)profitability and so forth 8. When I looked back, actually it was remarkable 9 how close they were. But I think that was more luck than anything else and considering the shift that happened in the 20)market place, the dot-com boom and bust 10, the shift away from banner advertising 11 to text advertising, which was, you know, the model that we thought would be more successful, but actually seeing that happen, it's all been really an incredible surprise and I think we've been incredibly lucky.

注释:
1) icon 3 [5aikRn] n. 偶像，大人物
2) make (a) splash <口>引起轰动，惹人注目
3) Webby Awards威比奖，是目前最具影响力的网站评选活动，由国际数字艺术与科学学会的委员会负责评选，号称是互联网的“奥斯卡”奖。
4) brash [brAF] a. 鲁莽的，无礼的
5) whiz kid 神童，优等生
6) buttoned-down 守旧的，缺乏独创性的
7) Lotus 美国莲花公司，曾是美国最大的PC软件公司
8) start up 创办，发起
9) warrant [5wCrEnt] v. 证明，保证
10) trait [treit] n. 显著的特点，特性
11) bargain [5bB:^in] n. 协议，交易
12) index [5indeks] v. 编入索引中，指出
13) query [5kwiEri] n. 询问
14) computing power （使用）计算（机的）能力
15) mainframe [5meinfreim] n. [计]主机
16) AdWords 关键词广告，Google推出的基于文本的广告系统，按实际用户点击数计费。
17) jot 7 down 草草记下
18) spreadsheet n. [计] 电子制表软件，电子数据表
19) profitability [7prCfitE5biliti] n. 收益性，利益率
20) market place 市场，市面

搜索Google三部曲

（一） Google传说

    要是你想了解一家企业，其管理层你也一定想了解。自微软后，科技界还没有出现过这样的事。Google的创立者们几近成名，实际上，算得上是偶像了。

    34岁的拉里·佩吉和30岁的谢尔盖·布林在读研究生时创立了Google。 2000年，他们首次在互联网工业的威比奖颁奖礼中大出风头。威比奖的负责人蒂法尼·史莱因说：“别瞧不起这些家伙。”

史莱因：我认为谢尔盖与拉里的厉害在于他们能将一个复杂的理念简单化。
   
而这些Google人究竟是怎样的人呢？是无惧风险的粗鲁网络神童？还是保守的新兴企业主管？哪一类更加适合我们去投资呢？米切尔·卡普尔说，现在下结论为时过早，但他却认识这两个Google人已经6年了。卡普尔是莲花公司的创始人，1982年，“莲花”就相当于现在的Google。当卡普尔最先认识这些Google人时，他们正处于创业阶段。

卡普尔：即使那时他们还没有足够的经验来作为自己自信的后盾，他们只觉得要按着他们自己的意愿来做事，其他事情自然会水到渠成。

不过，他现在说正是这种风格可能会成为问题。

卡普尔：他们必须表明自己会听取客户的意见，继而作出调整、改变，最后与其进行公平交易。

（二）“元老”之声

    谢尔盖·布林，加利福利亚州山景城Google公司的创始人之一。他通过自己办公室的电话与我们连线谈话。噢，搜索引擎是如何进行搜索的？

    哦，搜索引擎的工作分三步。第一步，我们称之为“抓取”，也就是搜寻网页。那跟你去网上冲浪很相像，就是点击一个接一个的链接，一页接一页地搜——只是我们几千台电脑一同做这项工作，而且尽快完成。然后，当我们搜到了所有的这些网页后，可能有好几十亿个，我们就开始将其编入索引中。然后，最后一步是找出某人——例如向我们发出查询要求的几亿用户中的一个——所查询的网页。接着，我们再访问索引并尝试找出回应查询要求的最佳网页。

    需要多大的计算机能力呢？那些计算机里配置了什么？是不是配置了台大主机吗？或者说，你们是用什么样的电脑的？

   噢，事实上我们用的只是那种个人电脑，跟你家里用的没什么两样，只是我们有好几万台……

   真的？

   而且安置在全球不同的数据中心。

    告诉我们有关经济方面的事吧。你从Google中赚了很多钱，是不是？

    噢，我会觉得这是一门成功的生意。最大的成功之一，是关键词广告计划，那是为广告客户服务的，而我们有超过十万客户。

    有人会想到……你们之前有没有想到这么快就取得如此巨大的成功？

    你知道，起初我们建立商业计划的时候，我只是随便在电子数据表上写下一些数字，而这种方式实行了几年，但是，你知道，这有点像预计盈利什么的。而当我回过头去看当初写下的数字，它们与现实有着惊人的相似。不过，我觉得运气还是最重要的，而且考虑到市场发生的转变，网络业的兴衰，标语广告向文本广告的转变——那是我们认为会更成功的模式，然而，看到这一切发生时，那确实带给我们意想不到的惊喜，所以我觉得我们真是幸运得让人难以置信。