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 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 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 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 and we access the index and we try to figure out what are the best pages to answer that query.       

How much 14)computing 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. When I looked back, actually it was remarkable 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, the shift away from banner advertising 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 [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 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