2007 Founders’s Letters to Alphabet Shareholders

Refer To：《2007 Founders' Letter》。

Introduction

It is amazing to me that it has been nearly ten years since Sergey and I founded Google. When we went public, we promised to write a yearly founders’ letter in a frank style to keep all of you updated on our progress. We’ve taken turns writing the letter, and this year that responsibility falls to me.

令我惊讶的是，自从 Sergey 和我创立谷歌以来，已经快十年了。当我们上市时，我们承诺会以坦率的风格撰写年度创始人信，以便让大家了解我们的进展。我们轮流撰写这封信，而今年这份责任落在了我身上.

We have seen our company scale tremendously, to more than 17,000 employees in 20 countries worldwide. But what’s even more amazing to me are the possibilities that appear before us—close enough to envision, but important enough to inspire our best efforts. I’m excited and hopeful we will continue to make progress in a wide variety of significant areas. I’m also happy to report that Sergey, Eric, and I continue to work together fabulously. I feel very lucky to be working with them and with our whole growing team (growing mostly just in numbers, despite our excellent food).

我们见证了公司规模的巨大扩展，如今我们在全球20个国家拥有超过17,000名员工。但更令我惊叹的是摆在我们面前的各种可能性——这些可能性既近在眼前，足以让人设想，又足够重要以激发我们全力以赴。我对我们将在众多重要领域继续取得进展感到兴奋和充满希望。我还很高兴地报告，Sergey、Eric 和我继续保持着极佳的合作。我觉得非常幸运能与他们以及我们不断壮大的团队一起工作（尽管我们的团队主要只是数量上的增长，但我们的伙食却异常出色）.

Speaking of our team, I wanted to give our deep thanks to George Reyes, our retiring chief financial officer. He has served Google extremely well. I also could not be more grateful to our users, customers, Googlers (our employees), and investors who help bring everything that is Google to life.

说到我们的团队，我想对即将退休的首席财务官 George Reyes 表示衷心的感谢。他为谷歌做出了极大的贡献。我还对我们的用户、客户、谷歌员工以及投资者表示无比感激，他们使得谷歌的一切得以生动呈现.

I will try to keep this letter relatively short, but I want to cover a lot of ground. I figure if you are interested in a particular area, you can just use Google to get more depth.

我将尽量使这封信保持相对简短，但我想涵盖许多内容。我想，如果你对某个领域感兴趣，你可以直接用谷歌查找更深入的信息.

Still Searching

Search is a really hard problem. To do a perfect job, you would need to understand all the world’s information, and the precise meaning of every query. With all that understanding, you would then have to produce the perfect answer instantly. We are making significant progress, but remain a long way from perfection. We’re so serious about improving search that more than a third of our people are working on it. Another third work on advertising. We have dramatically improved our understanding of all the different languages, the meanings and synonyms of words, and the many different types of specialized information such as businesses and products. We continue our effort to extract more and more real meaning from the web in order to help people find the right answers. We recently improved universal search, integrating different types of relevant information, such as video, maps, news, books, images, and more, right into your search results.

搜索仍然是个极其棘手的问题。要做到完美，你需要理解全世界的信息以及每个查询的精确含义。在拥有这种理解的前提下，你还必须立刻给出完美答案。我们在这一领域取得了重大进展，但距离完美仍有很长的路要走。我们对改进搜索如此认真，以至于超过三分之一的员工正在致力于此，另一三分之一的员工则专注于广告。我们大幅提升了对各种语言、单词含义及同义词，以及诸如企业和产品等各种专业信息的理解。我们不断努力从网络中提取越来越多的真实含义，以帮助人们找到正确答案。我们最近改进了通用搜索，将视频、地图、新闻、书籍、图像等各种相关信息整合到搜索结果中.

Sometimes you don’t get a good answer to a search because the information simply isn’t available on the web. So we are working hard to encourage ecosystems that can generate more content from more authors and creators. For example, we recently announced an early version of a tool called “knol” to help people generate and organize more high-quality authored content.

有时你之所以找不到好的搜索答案，是因为网络上根本没有那样的信息。所以，我们正努力推动生态系统的发展，以便让更多作者和创作者生成更多内容。例如，我们最近宣布了一个名为“knol”的工具的早期版本，旨在帮助人们生成并组织更多高质量的原创内容.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet’s continued growth. Our AdSense program also helps the content ecosystem by letting any author or publisher instantly make money by inserting Google-brokered ads into their pages. This helps them pay people to write more great content in a virtuous and profitable cycle for everyone.

促进高质量内容创作和编辑的系统对互联网的持续发展至关重要。我们的 AdSense 项目也通过允许任何作者或出版商在其页面中插入由谷歌中介的广告，即时赚取收入，从而帮助内容生态系统。这使得他们能够支付费用，让更多人撰写出优秀内容，从而形成一个良性且有利可图的循环.

In all of these efforts, of course, the trust of our users is paramount. We simply will not bias our search results for financial reasons. Our ads are separated from the search results and clearly labeled. We believe strongly in maintaining the integrity of search.

在所有这些努力中，用户的信任无疑是至关重要的。我们绝不会为了金钱原因而偏倚搜索结果。我们的广告与搜索结果是分开的，并且标识清晰。我们坚信必须维护搜索的完整性.

I’m happy to report that we have a tremendous number of ideas to further improve search. Just about every week, we implement a new (and often clever) improvement to our basic search system. We will continue to work very hard in this area for a long time to come.

我很高兴地报告，我们有大量想法进一步改进搜索。几乎每周，我们都会对基本搜索系统进行一次新（且常常巧妙）的改进。未来我们将在这一领域继续非常努力地工作.

Advertising

Advertising is even harder than search. Not only do you have to find the right ad for every situation, but you have to handle paying customers! We have developed very sophisticated advertising systems designed to benefit both users and advertisers. For users, we strive to produce relevant advertising as good as the main content or search results. For advertisers, we provide tools to target and tune their advertising and accurately measure the results of their spending. Just as with search, we devise new clever improvements to our advertising system nearly every week. Fundamentally, every advertisement you see from Google results from a real-time auction conducted among advertisers. Imagine if we had a real auctioneer, how breathless and tired she would become!

广告比搜索还要棘手。你不仅要为每种情况找到合适的广告，还得应对付费客户！我们开发了非常复杂的广告系统，旨在使用户和广告商都获益。对用户而言，我们努力提供与主要内容或搜索结果一样相关的广告；对广告商而言，我们提供工具来定位和调整其广告，并准确衡量其花费的效果。就像搜索一样，我们几乎每周都会对广告系统进行一次新颖且巧妙的改进。从根本上说，你看到的每个谷歌广告都源自广告商之间进行的实时拍卖。试想如果有个真实的拍卖师，她会多么气喘吁吁、疲惫不堪！

Our advertising system works well, but we still have tremendous opportunities to improve it. For example, I just did a search for natural swimming pool, which returned eight right-hand side ads, with only the last two of those somewhat relevant. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that we have enough breadth to have some relevant ads for an unusual topic. Furthermore, it is certainly possible to produce more relevant ads that would be valuable to both the user and the advertiser. Also, a user interested in natural pools is probably worth a considerable amount of money if there is enough competition among advertisers to bid up the auction price. The bad news is that we aren’t doing a good enough job yet for this natural pools query and many others. We also happened to have a number of local pool suppliers advertising in the San Francisco area for this query. Locally targeted advertising is another important area for us to grow both in revenue and relevance.

我们的广告系统运作良好，但我们仍有巨大的改进空间。例如，我刚搜索“自然泳池”，结果返回了八个右侧广告，其中只有最后两个稍微相关。这既是好消息，也是坏消息。好消息是，我们在处理这种非传统话题时拥有足够广度，能显示一些相关广告。此外，完全有可能生成对用户和广告商都有价值的更相关的广告。而对于对自然泳池感兴趣的用户来说，如果广告商之间竞争激烈，使拍卖价格上升，这个用户可能价值不菲。坏消息是，对于这个“自然泳池”查询及许多其他查询，我们还没有做得足够好。我们还发现，有不少旧金山地区的本地泳池供应商正在为这一查询投放广告。本地定向广告也是我们在收入和相关性上需要进一步发展的另一个重要领域.

This general problem of ad targeting is very difficult and requires cooperation from huge numbers of advertisers. We continue to make significant progress on this challenging but exceptionally worthwhile problem. Sergey and I spend an action-packed hour nearly every week reviewing the noteworthy changes to the ads system.

广告定向这一普遍问题非常困难，需要大量广告商的合作。我们在这一既具挑战性又极具价值的问题上持续取得重大进展。Sergey 和我几乎每周都会花一个充满活力的小时审查广告系统中的显著变化.

70-20-10

We are still keeping to our long-standing plan of devoting 70% of our resources to search and advertising. We debate where we should classify our Apps (Gmail, Docs, etc.) products, but they currently fall into the 20% of resources we devote to related businesses. We use the remaining 10% of our resources on areas that are farther afield but have huge potential, such as Android. We strongly believe that allocating modest resources to new areas is crucial to continuing to innovate. This 10% of our resources generates a tremendous amount of interest and press, precisely because these projects are different and new. Often, we find small teams of only a few people suddenly command huge attention worldwide. That’s useful to keep in mind as you read about Google—the vast majority of our resources are working on our core businesses: search and advertising.

我们仍然坚持长期以来的计划，将70%的资源投入到搜索和广告中。我们讨论如何将我们的应用产品（如 Gmail、文档等）归类，但目前它们占用的资源约为20%，用于相关业务。剩余10%的资源用于那些范围较远但潜力巨大的领域，比如 Android。我们坚信，将适度资源分配给新领域对持续创新至关重要。正因为这些项目既不同又新颖，这10%的资源引发了巨大的关注和媒体报道。我们常常发现，仅由几个人组成的小团队突然在全球引起巨大关注。在阅读有关谷歌的内容时，请记住：我们绝大部分资源都在专注于核心业务——搜索和广告.

iPhone在这一年推出。

Of course, the needs of the 70% projects are different from the needs of the smaller 10% projects. While I would like to report we understand how to structure these perfectly, we are still actively evolving how we create, manage, and compensate these different kinds of projects. This is a crucial area of focus as we work to recruit and retain the best people, and keep them really happy, organized, and productive.

当然，70%项目的需求与那10%小项目的需求不同。虽然我希望能报告我们已经完美构建了这些结构，但我们仍在不断改进如何创建、管理和补偿这些不同类型的项目。这是我们在招聘和留住最佳人才、使他们保持愉悦、有序且高效工作时必须重点关注的领域.

Acquisitions

Throughout our history, we have acquired more than 50 companies. Our goal is to be the best home for amazing companies that want to be acquired. We acquire companies in all different stages of development, but I will cover some of the larger deals here. We acquired YouTube a bit more than a year ago, and it has been growing like gangbusters. Eric worked with YouTube leaders Chad and Steve to establish a largely independent operating structure, with YouTube remaining in a separate office in San Bruno, about 25 miles from the main Googleplex. This is working well.

在我们的历史上，我们已收购了50多家公司。我们的目标是成为那些渴望被收购的优秀公司的最佳归宿。我们收购处于各个发展阶段的公司，但我将在这里介绍一些较大的交易。我们在一年多以前收购了 YouTube，而它的发展迅猛异常。Eric 与 YouTube 领导者 Chad 和 Steve 合作，建立了一个基本独立的运营结构，使 YouTube 保持在位于 San Bruno 的一个独立办公室中，距离主谷歌园区约25英里。这个安排运行得很好.

When we acquired Postini last year, we significantly enhanced our enterprise email capabilities and reinforced our commitment to serve the enterprise market. And by the time you read this, our acquisition of DoubleClick will have likely been cleared in Europe as well as the U.S. We are fortunate that DoubleClick’s headquarters is in the same building as our Manhattan Googleplex, which will make for easier communication between the combined teams, now totaling a few thousand people. I believe DoubleClick’s expertise in display advertising will be a tremendous addition to Google and will help open up new opportunities in this important market.

去年，当我们收购 Postini 时，我们显著增强了企业电子邮件功能，并强化了服务企业市场的承诺。当你阅读此文时，我们对 DoubleClick 的收购可能已在欧洲和美国均获批准。我们很幸运，DoubleClick 的总部与我们位于曼哈顿的谷歌园区在同一栋大楼内，这将使合并后的团队（现总数达数千人）之间的沟通更加便捷。我相信 DoubleClick 在展示广告方面的专业能力将为谷歌带来巨大助益，并有助于开辟这一重要市场的新机遇.

Apps

We have made tremendous strides in our web applications. I am writing this using Google Docs. I don’t have to worry that my computer hard drive might fail and lose my work, because it is automatically being saved into the Google network cloud. Sharing what I write is easy. My colleagues can write and edit the live copy without having to email endless revisions (my writing needs a lot of revising!). You can also create spreadsheets and presentations in Docs. Every week, I approve a Google spreadsheet with a summary of every single hire we are making worldwide. With Google Apps, you can collaborate and share all types of documents and calendars with other people in your organization in seconds.

我们在网络应用方面取得了巨大进展。我正使用谷歌文档撰写这封信。我无需担心电脑硬盘故障而丢失工作，因为文档会自动保存到谷歌网络云端。分享我所写的内容变得十分容易。我的同事们可以实时编写和编辑文稿，而不必通过电子邮件发送无休止的修订（我的写作需要大量修订！）。你还可以在文档中创建电子表格和演示文稿。每周，我都会审核一份谷歌电子表格，总结我们在全球每一笔招聘情况。使用谷歌应用，你可以在几秒钟内与组织中的其他人协作并共享各类文档和日历.

Gmail continues to enjoy tremendous growth, and now has a brand new implementation that’s faster and makes it easier for us to add new features. Instant messaging within Gmail—which works right inside your browser with no installation—has been a big hit. We’re also planning to roll out a plethora of new features. We are working hard to combine our many Apps offerings into a more coherent set of products that “just work.” I use Google Apps every day for all of my work.

Gmail 持续高速增长，现在拥有了全新的实现方式，更加快速，并使我们更易于添加新功能。Gmail 内部的即时消息（在浏览器中无需安装即可运行）大受欢迎。我们还计划推出大量新功能。我们正在努力将众多应用整合成一套更连贯、运行流畅的产品。我每天都在工作中使用谷歌应用.

Our products are improving quickly and have incredibly powerful sharing and chat functionality that wasn’t possible before the web.

我们的产品迅速改进，拥有了网络出现之前无法实现的极强的共享和聊天功能.

We’ve started the next phase in productivity software. That phase is about working with everyone seamlessly and effortlessly. Our goal is fast, easy access to create or share from any computer in the world. No futzing with software required. Just open your browser.

我们已迈入生产力软件的下一阶段。这一阶段旨在实现与所有人无缝、轻松的协作。我们的目标是在世界上任何一台电脑上快速、轻松地创建或共享，无需繁琐的软件操作。只需打开你的浏览器.

Mobile

Android is our newly announced mobile phone platform. We’ve gathered more than 30 companies together into Android’s Open Handset Alliance. The goals of Android are ambitious: We aim to make your phone work better than your computer. Android is very open, so you can run any software, just like a computer. Today, Android is released as a software toolkit for developers based on Linux, Java, and high-end web browser technologies. We and our partners are very much looking forward to having Android ship in real devices. We are excited about realizing the potential of that little computer in your pocket (your cool, web-centric Android phone).

Android 是我们新宣布的移动电话平台。我们已将30多家公司聚集到 Android 开放手机联盟中。Android 的目标雄心勃勃：我们旨在使你的手机比电脑运行得更好。Android 非常开放，因此你可以像在电脑上一样运行任何软件。如今，Android 作为一个基于 Linux、Java 和高端网页浏览器技术的开发工具包发布。我们和合作伙伴都非常期待 Android 能在真实设备上出货。我们对实现你口袋中那台小电脑的潜力（你那酷炫、以网络为中心的 Android 手机）感到兴奋.

In addition to Android, we endeavor to make all of our products work well with existing phones and have been quite successful with much greater usage in a wide variety of areas. We have been working to try to apply some of the open-access principles of the Internet to increase user choice and innovation in the mobile space. We also have been active with a 10% project focused on wireless spectrum, which has created a great deal of interest. We were successful in helping convince the US Federal Communications Commission to attach most of our desired openness principles to the ongoing 700 Mhz auction.

此外，我们努力使所有产品与现有手机协同良好，并在许多领域取得了更高的使用率。我们一直在尝试应用互联网的开放获取原则，以增加移动领域中用户的选择和创新。我们还积极推进一个占用10%资源、专注于无线频谱的项目，该项目引起了广泛关注。我们成功地帮助说服美国联邦通信委员会，在正在进行的700兆赫拍卖中附加了我们大部分期望的开放性原则.

The World

It turns out the real world matters to people, in the form of maps, satellite images, business locations, bike paths, and all other types of geographic data. We are hard at work in all these domains. We even launched photographs of nearly everything at street level in 30 metro areas, integrated right into Google Maps (click the Street View button). Google Earth literally goes out of this world with a new Sky mode (just click on the Sky icon). You can see an amazing view of the night sky, complete with super-high resolution images from the Hubble telescope that you can zoom right into.

事实证明，现实世界对人们来说至关重要，表现在地图、卫星图像、商业地点、自行车道以及其他各类地理数据上。我们在所有这些领域都在努力工作。我们甚至在30个大都市区推出了街景级别的几乎所有地点的照片，并直接整合到谷歌地图中（点击街景按钮）。谷歌地球凭借全新的天空模式（只需点击天空图标）真是超越了这个世界。你可以看到令人惊叹的夜空视图，配有来自哈勃望远镜的超高分辨率图像，可以直接放大查看.

Speaking of the world, we don’t want it to end—especially by environmental catastrophe. Consequently, we are working hard on our own considerable energy use in data centers by making them far more efficient. We’re working directly on our own carbon/methane offsets to cover our usage. But we are all on the same Spaceship Earth, and we need to energetically address harmful emissions. To this end, we launched RE<C, an initiative to make renewable energy cheaper than coal-fired plants. We have started our own internal development effort, and have made investments in promising technologies. We are working on new clean technologies that could make more energy than we have now, and do it at a lower cost. Our goal is to generate a gigawatt (roughly enough to power San Francisco) of clean, cheap energy in years, not decades. If we are successful, we will not only help the world, but also make substantial profits.

说到世界，我们不希望世界终结——尤其是因环境灾难。因此，我们正在努力通过大幅提高数据中心的效率来降低自身能源消耗。我们正直接致力于自身碳/甲烷抵消措施以覆盖我们的用能。但我们都在同一艘“地球飞船”上，我们需要积极应对有害排放。为此，我们启动了 RE<C 计划，一项旨在使可再生能源比燃煤电厂更便宜的倡议。我们已开始内部开发，并在有前景的技术上进行了投资。我们正在研发新的清洁技术，期望以更低成本生产出比现在更多的能源。我们的目标是在几年内（而非几十年）产生1吉瓦的清洁、廉价能源（大约足以为旧金山供电）。如果成功，我们不仅将帮助世界，还会获得可观的利润.

We continue our efforts to make Google more global. Google is available in 160 different local country domains and 117 languages (including some obscure ones like “Swedish Chef” - Bork, Bork, Bork). While Google is available virtually everywhere there is Internet access, our business operations are in just 20 countries. We are still working to establish a significant business presence in places such as the Middle East. As we expand our operations and hire our first employees in another country, that part of Google feels like a startup.

我们继续努力使谷歌更加全球化。谷歌在160个不同的本地区域和117种语言（包括一些冷门语言，如“瑞典厨师”——Bork, Bork, Bork）中均可访问。虽然只要有互联网接入几乎无处不在，但我们的业务运营仅分布在20个国家。我们仍在努力在中东等地区建立显著的业务存在。当我们扩展业务并在其他国家聘用首批员工时，那部分谷歌就仿佛一个初创企业.

We started Google.org with the idea of eclipsing the impact of Google itself while focusing on more philanthropic causes. Though we are working on extremely tough problems in difficult locations, we have made significant strides. We have established several main focus areas, including predicting and preventing disease; improving public services by informing and empowering people; and increasing economic growth and job creation through stimulating small- and medium-sized enterprises.

我们创立了 Google.org，旨在在关注更多慈善事业的同时，超越谷歌本身的影响力。尽管我们在艰难地区处理极其棘手的问题，但我们已经取得了重大进展。我们确定了几个主要关注领域，包括预测和预防疾病；通过传递信息和赋能人们来改善公共服务；以及通过激励中小企业促进经济增长和就业创造.

Conclusion

By organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, we’re helping people worldwide make better decisions and improve their lives. I feel lucky—I am lucky—to be involved in this important ecosystem of better information. While almost all of our effort is focused on important improvements to core search and advertising, the small percentage left over is producing a lot of important innovation and even more notice from the world. I could not be more excited about all the possibilities for Googlers to produce amazing computer experiences that their mothers and fathers—and hundreds of millions of other people—will use every day.

通过整理全球信息并使其普遍可获取和有用，我们正在帮助全世界的人们做出更好的决策并改善生活。我觉得自己很幸运——我真幸运，能参与这一重要的、提供更优信息的生态系统。虽然我们几乎所有的努力都集中在核心搜索和广告的重要改进上，但剩下的那小部分资源正带来许多重要的创新，并引起全球更多关注。我对谷歌员工能创造出令人惊叹的计算机体验感到无比兴奋——这些体验将被他们的父母以及数亿其他人每天使用.

Larry Page Signature

Larry Page

Sergei B signature

Sergey Brin

2007 Founders’s Letters to Alphabet Shareholders

2007 Founders’s Letters to Alphabet Shareholders

Introduction

Still Searching

Advertising

70-20-10

Acquisitions

Apps

Mobile

The World

Conclusion

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