计算机英语翻译－－题目三

A Little History

The Internet is really just an ever-growing series of interconnected computer networks that has been around since the late 1960s. Initially, the people who roamed the Internet were military officials, scientists, computer programmers, and other geek types who could deal with what was then a user-hostile system. All you saw were endless lines of words, and everything you did required an arcane text command. There were no photos, and there was no clicking. Instead, there were a lot of dull amber monitors and a ton of typing.

By the early 1990s, people had begun developing not only useful systems that ran on the Internet, like email and newsgroups, but also programs that made them easier to use (think Outlook and Eudora). Among the nifty new Internet systems was the World Wide Web, a network of documents and databases that, when viewed through a software program called a Web browser, let people share information visually and use a mouse to navigate around it. Clicking turned out to be a pretty intuitive way for people to sift through information, and Web surfing was born.

But before the Internet could become commonplace in civilian life, people needed an easy way to find other people and things on the Internet. In 1994, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University introduced Lycos, the first Web-based search engine a program to help you find stuff on the Web. And the people rejoiced.

Actually, the geeks rejoiced. Seeing tremendous opportunity in providing search services on the Web, a mess of technology companies sprung up and launched search sites. Some sites, like Yahoo, were directories that slotted Web pages into predetermined categories that people could then browse through. Others, like HotBot, AltaVista, Excite, and Infoseek, ran full-text search engines, programs that tracked the words on Web pages and then, when you searched for a word or phrase, sent you to the pages it knew contained them.

Unlike directories, which let people create categories and assign Web pages to them, full-text search engines use computers to record the words on Web pages. In fact, such search engines rely on two automated programs to track Web pages. First, spiders, also known as robots or crawlers, go out and methodically trawl the Web, downloading copies of pages as they go. Second, programs called indexers record the text on the downloaded pages, along with important information that's encoded in themthings like the page title, links to other pages, and so forth. Indexers store all this stuff in a database, helpfully called an index or sometimes a catalog. To keep up to date, spiders return once a month or so to the pages they've visited, making note of dead links and handing off new or changed pages to the indexers for recording.

When you use a full-text search engine to look for something, it actually searches its indexnot the entire live Web, which would be impossible.

Note: Google's index currently has more than eight billion Web pages, according to the company.

By the late 1990s, both kinds of searchesdirectory and full-textwere wide-spread and user-friendly, and non-geeks began taking to the Internet like cats take to tuna fish.

How the Web Was Won: Google's Technology

In the Web's early days, full-text searches ranked their results according to information contained on Web sites themselveslike the prominence of a certain word. If, for example, you wanted to learn about buying a small dog and you searched for dachshund, your list of sites was likely to be organized by which ones had the most instances of the word "dachshund." That might well have been a site set up by a woman in Boise who painted cartoon dogs onto sweatshirts, the schedule for a group of people in Sacramento who have dachshunds with ingrown toenails, and the Daytona Dachshunds Little League roster. You could search through thousands of pages before you hit any useful information.

Even if you narrowed your search to something like "dachshund breeders," you might still have gotten sites run by pet food conglomerates or veterinarians or any company that set up its Web pages to draw people with an interest in dogs. In short, it was maddeningly hard to get relevant search results.

Enter Google. In 1995, Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in the graduate computer science program at Stanford University . Their idea was to create a search engine that would rank search results not on data that could be manipulated by Web masters, but by using the strength of the Internet itselfcommunity input. Their technology evaluated a site primarily on how many other sites linked to it, and ranked search results accordingly. Thus, their searches tended to return results that lots of other people found useful, resulting in a surprisingly valuable system.

By 1998, Brin and Page had dropped out of Stanford to start Google. In its first year, the companyrun by four employees out of a garage in Menlo Park , Californiaanswered about 10,000 search requests per day. Today, the Web is home to about a dozen very popular search sites and likely thousands of less well-known ones, but Google's computers handle more search requests than anyone else's over 250 million per day.

Google is the reigning search champ not because the company has clever marketing (it doesn't) or a killer online dating service (again, no dice), but because the site is easy to use and effective.

Tip: Wonder what all those people are searching for? Google provides snapshots of its search activity, by month and by year, at Google Zeitgeist, www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html. This is the perfect place to find out if anyone still cares about Martha Stewart or whether The Apprentice is declining in popularity.

How the Ranking Works

Google uses a number of elements to decide whether a Web page is a good match for a particular search. First, it looks at links. Links from one Web page to another don't appear spontaneously; people have to make themin effect saying, "Look here and here and here." Because each link thus represents a decision, Google infers that a link from one page to another is tantamount to a vote for the second page. Pages with lots of votes are considered more important than other pages. For example, if a million baseball-fan Web sites all have links to MLB.com (home of Major League Baseball), Google's logic is, "Hey, that's an important site for people searching for the word baseball."

In addition, Google ranks the pages that cast the votes, based on their own popularity, and gives more weight to the votes from heavily linked-to pages. Finally, Google uses this information to assign Web pages an appropriate PageRankGoogle's term for statuswhich it calculates on a scale from one to ten.

Note: The term PageRank is actually based on the name of one of Google's founders, Larry Page, not on the idea of Web pages.

But all that jazz would lead to nothing more than an interesting hierarchy of Web popularity if it didn't take into account the words you're searching for. So when you query Google, it combines PageRank with an additional system for matching textwhich looks not only at the content on a first layer of pages, but at the content on pages linking to themto produce a list of pages that is, more often than not, relevant.

In all, the Google equation, or algorithm, incorporates 500 million variables looking at everything from links to the position of your search terms on a page. And most searches run in much less than a second.

Because the site's methods are so complex, it's toughthough not impossibleto jigger a page in order to improve its rank in a Google search.

Comparing Google with Other Searches

Most of the time, you'll probably decide which search site to use based on the relevance of its results. But these days, many search sites return similar results, which means you might want to make your choice based on factors like speed and site design. It's akin to buying a car today: most automobiles will get you where you want to go, but they differ in reliability, smoothness, and style.

For many researchers, Google is the no-brainer choice for searching the Web because it's fast, neat, smart, and fun.

Gmail

When Google unveiled Gmail, its free Web-based email service, on April 1, 2004, and announced that each user could have an entire gigabyte of space for mail and attachments, many people assumed it was a nerdy April Fool's joke. (A gigabyte is so large, it needs its own box to explain how big it is.) Most free Webmail services at the time parceled out only 2, 4, or maybe 10 megabytes of mailspace (a megabyte is about a thousand times smaller than a gigabyte). With those services, when your inbox filled up with spam, your incoming messages started bouncing back like toddlers on a trampoline.

Google wasn't joking about the gigabyte. As with the other Webmail services, it lets you check your mail and send messages from just about any computer, anywhere on the planet, that has a Web browser and an Internet connection. But with Gmail, you have room to receive and save all your messages, tootwo and a half times over, now that Google has upgraded its accounts to store two gigabytes instead of one.

Note: Several other Webmail services have scrambled to improve their own offerings since Gmail got up and running. Hotmail accounts now offer 250 megabytes of room for mail, and Yahoo upped its free mailbox capacity to one gigabyte per person in an attempt to match Gmailbut it tries to wheedle $ 20 a year from you for the two-gigabyte account. Gmailers now get 2.5 gigs free.

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In addition to giving you two and a half gigabytes of server space to pile up your electronic epistles, Google has included some other features with Gmail that make it stand out from your average Webmail service. For one, your new Gmail account can handle file attachments up to 10 megabytes in size, which means if your spouse goes nuts with the digital camera and emails you a half-dozen high-resolution photos of the new beagle puppy attached to a single message, they should land in your Gmail Inbox just fine. Most other email services have smaller attachment limits, which means those pics are likely to bounce back.

Size is not the only thing that matters in Gmail. The service has a number of other cool features, including:

·         Rich text. Instead of boring, plain text, you can use different fonts and colorsnot to mention bullet points and highlightingin messages.

·         Multiple languages. Display the Gmail interface in any of 13 different languages, including French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, simplified or traditional Chinese, and two flavors of English: U.S. or U.K.

·         Google your Gmail. If you think any email service created by the world's largest search engine would be super-speedy, you'd be right. The Gmail search pops up matching messages quickly and accurately, and does the same when you're looking for someone within your Gmail Contacts address book.

·         Contacts importing. Speaking of contacts, you know that huge list of email addresses in your Yahoo or Outlook Express address book? You can bring the gang along when you make the jump to Gmail with just a couple of clicks.

·         Gmail everywhere. People read email in all kinds of ways, including on portable devices like BlackBerry handhelds, downloaded with software like Outlook Express, and forwarded from other email programs. Gmail is flexible enough to follow you anywhere and into nearly any email program you want to use.

So how does Google expect to make money from offering all of these features and services with Gmail? The same way ABC can afford to bring you new episodes of Alias every Wednesday night: advertising. Gmail displays ads alongside your email messages.

Despite the fact that Gmail is free, noncompulsory, and useful, it drew a lot of criticism early on for displaying advertising. "But ads show up everywhere on the Web these days," you say. "Why would anyone care about these ads in particular?" The thing that freaked people out was that Gmail ads were related to your email messages, making it seem as if Google employees were sifting through your Inbox, matching ads to your personal life.

For example, if you received an email from your mother about your great-uncle's funeral, the ads along the side might be for hearse services. While some people found those ads useful or simply ignorable, others thought they were a breach of privacy.

In fact, Google uses a sophisticated software system to look for keywords and slot in potentially relevant ads; no humans at Google read your Gmail to make sure you're getting the right ads. Once the world got used to that idea, the controversy over Gmail died down, and people got on with the project of creating and storing a massive amount of email.

Note: Gmail is a free service: You can't pay a fee in order to prevent those ads from appearing. If ad intrusion, however robotic, still squicks you out, perhaps Gmail is not the service for you.(Incidentally, the ads in Gmail come from the same pool as those in AdSense and AdWords.)

This chapter takes a look at the ins and outs of Gmail, from setting up your account and composing messages to keeping track of that 528-message round-robin mail chat you have going with your buddies about the Philadelphia Eagles. As you'll see on the following pages, Webmailespecially two and a half gigabytes of itcan be incredibly liberating.

Note: Gmail works on most, but not all, Web browsers and operating systems. Although you can still read mail on, say, Internet Explorer creaking along on an arthritic Mac OS 9 system, you'll need a Gmail-approved browser to fully use all of the service's features.Minimum versions of Windows Web browsers that fully support the Gmail service include Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.4 and Firefox 0.8. Mac OS X and Linux fans can get by with Firefox 0.8, Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4, and the Mac folks also have the option of using Apple's Safari 1.2.1 browser for their Gmailing.

Google Maps

Online map sites are among the most useful services on the World Wide Web. With MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, and their ilk, you can quickly plot your driving trip from start to finish by typing in the two addressesno matter where they are in the country. With a graphical map and step-by-step driving directions, it's a heck of a lot faster than schlepping down to AAA and picking up a marked-up TripTik before you hit the road.

Google Maps wasn't the first online map site, but in typical Google fashion, it's one of the fastest, easiest, and most versatile sites in the cartographic category. Unlike other map sites, Google Maps is dynamic and interactive. In other words, if you want to see the next few streets over from your house, you can just drag the map to pull the adjacent neighborhood into view, rather than having to wait for the whole page to refresh. No other free map service comes close.

You have your choice of views with Google Maps, too. You get the standard road and street grids, of course, but if you're feeling omniscient, you can switch to a satellite (that is, photographic) view of the same area with just one click. You can even get a "Hybrid" map that combines the two views, superimposing street maps on a satellite photo of your destination.

Even if you're not actually going anywhere, it's easy to lose yourself in Google Maps for hours, just wandering around and looking at close-ups of your neighbors' houses. You can even annotate your maps with the location of the nearest tapas bar in towna stunt that, 20 years ago, would have required an actual map and thumbtack.

Using Google Maps

If you want to see a map of a certain location with Google Maps, browse on over to http://maps.google.com. You can zoom right in on the map of the United States and use your mouse to drag through until you find your town, but it's quicker to just type your address in the box at the top and then click the Search button. Google Maps presents you with a street diagram, complete with a little pushpin icon pointing to the address you provided. A comic-book-style balloon displays your address and lets you get directions to or from the location.