Since 2004, when Google began to have annual reports, Larry and I have taken turns writing an annual letter. I never imagined I would be writing one in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in decades. As I write this, search queries are reflecting economic hardship, the major market indexes are one half of what they were less than 18 months ago, and unemployment is at record levels.  

自2004年以来，当谷歌开始发布年报时，Larry 和我便轮流撰写年度信件。我从未想过会在几十年来前所未见的经济危机中撰写一封信。当我写下这封信时，搜索查询反映出经济困境，主要市场指数仅为18个月前的一半，失业率也达到了历史最高水平.

Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge. While much smaller in scale than today’s global collapse, the dot-com bust of 2000-2002 pushed Google and others in the industry to take some tough decisions — and we all emerged stronger as a result.  

尽管如此，我对未来仍持乐观态度，因为我相信稀缺带来清晰：它使人们集中精力，迫使大家创造性思考并迎接挑战。虽然2000至2002年的网络泡沫破裂在规模上远不及今天的全球性崩溃，但它促使谷歌和业内其他公司做出了一些艰难的决定——结果我们都变得更加强大.

This new crisis punctuates the end of our first decade as a company, a decade that has brought great change to Google, the web and the Internet as a whole. As I reflect on this short time period, our accomplishments and our shortcomings, I am very excited about what the next ten years may bring.  

这场新危机标志着我们作为一家公司的第一个十年的结束，这十年给谷歌、整个网络和互联网带来了巨大变革。当我回顾这段短暂的时光、我们的成就与不足时，我对未来十年可能带来的变化感到非常兴奋.

But let me start a little farther back — in 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its “What’s New” page at a rate of about one a day: http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.  

但让我稍微回溯一些——1990年，世界上第一个网页在 http://info.cern.ch/ 被创建。到1992年底，全球仅有26个网站，因此搜索引擎的需求并不大。1993年，当NCSA Mosaic（第一款广泛使用的网页浏览器）推出时，每个新创建的网站每天大约都会以“一条”的速度出现在其“最新动态”页面上：http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm。仅仅五年后，即1998年，网页数量已达到数千万，搜索变得至关重要。那时，谷歌还是斯坦福大学的一个小型研究项目；同年晚些时候，它成为了一家微型初创公司。搜索索引存放在少量类似乐高积木封装的硬盘上。大约只有几千人，主要是学者在使用这一服务.

Fast forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google’s services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones. Like many other web companies, the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information, but there is much more left to do.  

快进到今天，规模上的变化令人震撼。互联网本身以及我们的搜索索引都增长了约10,000倍。如今每天使用谷歌服务的人数已达到数亿。更重要的是，现在有数十亿人通过电脑和手机接入互联网。像其他许多网络公司一样，我们绝大部分服务在全球范围内免费提供，因为它们由广告支持。因此，发展中国家网吧中的孩子可以使用与世界上最富有的人相同的在线工具。我为谷歌在信息民主化中所扮演的小角色感到自豪，但还有很多工作要做.

Search remains at the very core of what we do at Google, just as it has been from our earliest days. As the scale has changed dramatically over the years, the presentation and quality of our search results have also undergone many changes since 1998. In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day. Some are not easy to spot, such as changes in ranking based on personalization (launched broadly in 2005) but they are important in getting the most relevant search results. Others are very easy to see and improve search efficiency in a very clear way, such as spelling correction, annotations, and suggestions.  

搜索始终是谷歌工作的核心，就像我们最初时那样。随着多年来规模的剧变，我们搜索结果的呈现方式和质量自1998年以来也经历了许多变化。仅在过去一年中，我们对网络搜索就做了359处改进——几乎每天都有一次。有些改进不易察觉，例如基于个性化（2005年广泛推出）的排名变化，但它们对于获得最相关的搜索结果非常重要。另一些则非常明显，能以极其清晰的方式提高搜索效率，如拼写校正、注释和建议.

While I am proud of what has been accomplished in search over the past decade, there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress. Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much “smarter” in the coming decade.  

虽然我为过去十年在搜索方面取得的成就感到自豪，但在一些关键领域我希望我们能取得更多进展。完美的搜索需要达到人类水平的人工智能，而许多人认为这仍然遥不可及。然而，我认为很快我们就能拥有一款比现在更能“理解”查询和文档的搜索引擎。虽然其他人声称已实现这一目标，且谷歌的系统在幕后比外界所见更为聪明，但整个领域仍未达到我所预期的水平。部分原因在于互联网的剧增——对于任何特定查询，很可能有许多使用完全相同词汇的文档。而随着互联网的增长，搜索者的好奇心的广度和深度也随之增加。我预计在未来十年，我们的搜索引擎将变得更加“智能”.

So too will the interfaces by which users look for and receive information. While many things have changed, the basic structure of Google search results today is fairly similar to how it was ten years ago. This is partly because of the benefits of simplicity; in fact, the Google home page has become increasingly simple over the years: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html. But we are starting to see more significant changes in search interfaces. Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today.  

同样，用户搜索和接收信息的界面也将发生变化。尽管许多事物已发生变化，但如今谷歌搜索结果的基本结构与十年前相当相似。这部分归功于简洁性的好处；事实上，多年来谷歌主页变得越来越简洁：http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html。但我们已经开始看到搜索界面上更为显著的变化。如今，你可以仅通过对手机讲话进行搜索，谷歌阅读器甚至能在没有任何查询的情况下推荐有趣的博客。我期望在未来十年中，我们的搜索和结果将与今天大不相同.

Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. Some queries seem like natural choices to show video results, such as for sports and travel destinations. Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics.  

YouTube  

视频通常被认为是一种娱乐媒介，但它也是高质量信息的重要来源。某些查询似乎天生适合显示视频结果，如体育和旅游目的地。然而，视频对于计算机硬件与软件（我购买上一个RAID就是基于视频评测）、科学实验以及诸如量子力学课程的教育等主题也是极好的资源.

Google Video was first launched in 2005 as a search service for television content because TV close-captioning made search possible and user-generated video had yet to take off. But it subsequently evolved to a site where individuals and corporations alike could post their own videos. Today Google Video searches many different video hosting sites, the largest of which is YouTube, which we acquired in 2006.  

2005年，谷歌视频首次作为电视内容的搜索服务推出，因为电视字幕使得搜索成为可能，而用户生成的视频尚未起飞。但随后它发展成为一个个人和公司都能上传自己视频的网站。如今，谷歌视频搜索许多不同的视频托管网站，其中最大的是我们于2006年收购的 YouTube.

Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. YouTube channels now include world leaders (the President of the United States and Prime Ministers of Japan, the UK and Australia), royalty (The Queen of England and Queen Rania of Jordan), religious leaders (the Pope), and those seeking free expression (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube).  

每分钟有15小时的视频上传到 YouTube——相当于每周新增86,000部全长电影。现在的 YouTube 频道包括世界领导人（美国总统、日本、英国和澳大利亚首相）、皇室成员（英国女王和约旦王后拉尼亚）、宗教领袖（教皇），以及追求自由表达的人们（例如，当委内瑞拉广播公司 El Observador 被政府关闭时，它开始在 YouTube 上播放）.

When it began, online video was associated with small fuzzy images. Today, many of our uploads are in HD quality (720 rows and greater) and can be streamed to computers, televisions, and mobile phones with increasing fidelity (thanks to improvements in video compression). In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device.  

起初，在线视频通常与模糊的小图像联系在一起。如今，我们上传的许多视频都是高清质量（720行及以上），可以以不断提高的保真度传输到电脑、电视和手机上（多亏了视频压缩技术的改进）。未来，各种影院级质量的视频库（4000+列）将能在任何设备上即时观看.

Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world and from the earliest days of Google we hoped to eventually incorporate them into our search corpus. Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. By 2003, we launched Google Print, now called Google Book Search. Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. Moreover, in October we reached a landmark agreement with a broad class of authors and publishers, including the Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers. If approved by the Court, this deal will make millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online — something that has been simply unavailable to date. Many of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find because they are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves; yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. The agreement also provides other important public benefits, including increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States.  

图书是世界上最伟大的信息来源之一，从谷歌最初成立之初，我们就希望最终将书籍纳入我们的搜索语料库。几年来，Larry 曾在我们的办公室用临时搭建的装置试验数字化图书。到2003年，我们推出了谷歌印刷（现称谷歌图书搜索）。如今，我们能够搜索近1000万本书的全文。此外，今年十月，我们与一大批作者和出版商（包括作者协会和美国出版商协会）达成了具有里程碑意义的协议。如果经法院批准，该协议将使数百万本受版权保护且已绝版的书籍能供美国读者在线搜索、预览和购买——这一点至今一直未能实现。这些书籍中许多由于不在书店出售或不在大多数图书馆藏书中而难以找到，甚至几乎找不到；然而它们构成了现存书籍的绝大多数。该协议还提供了其他重要的公共利益，包括为残疾用户增加访问权限、创建一个非盈利登记系统帮助他人获得这些书的许可、建立一个促进基础研究的语料库，以及在美国每个公共图书馆设置一个亭子免费提供全文访问.

While digitizing all the world’s books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October 2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographic needs. By offering both Google Earth and Google Maps, we aim to provide a comprehensive world model encompassing all geographic information including imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. Today we stitch together images from satellites, airplanes, cars, and user uploads, as well as collect important data, such as roads, from numerous different sources including governments, companies, and directly from users. After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months.  

虽然将全世界的书籍数字化是一项雄心勃勃的工程，但数字化整个世界则更具挑战性。自2004年10月我们收购 Keyhole（谷歌地球的基础）以来，我们的目标就是为地理需求提供高质量的信息。通过同时提供谷歌地球和谷歌地图，我们旨在构建一个包含所有地理信息（包括图像、地形、道路、建筑物和注释）的综合世界模型。如今，我们将来自卫星、飞机、汽车和用户上传的图像拼接在一起，并从政府、公司以及用户处直接收集重要数据，如道路信息。在巴基斯坦推出谷歌地图制作器后，用户在仅两个月内就绘制了25,000公里未标绘的道路.

We always believed that we could have an advertising system that would add value not only to our bottom line but also to the quality of our search result pages. Rather than relying on distracting flashy ads, we developed relevant, clearly marked text-based ads above and to the right of our search results. After a number of early experiments, the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. As we syndicated it to EarthLink and then AOL, it became an important source of revenue for other companies as well.  

我们始终相信，我们可以建立一种广告系统，不仅能提升我们的盈利，还能提高搜索结果页面的质量。我们没有依赖分散注意力的花哨广告，而是在搜索结果上方和右侧开发了相关且标明清晰的基于文本的广告。经过一系列早期实验，2000年推出了首个自助服务系统——AdWords，最初拥有350个广告客户。虽然与当时的横幅广告相比这些广告产生的收入较少，但随着网络泡沫破裂，该系统成为了我们的救命稻草。随后我们将其推广至 EarthLink 及 AOL，它也成为其他公司重要的收入来源.

Today, AdWords has grown beyond just being a feature of Google. It is a vast ecosystem that provides valuable traffic and leads to hundreds of thousands of businesses: indeed in many ways it has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies. AdWords is also an important source of revenue for websites that create the content that we all search. Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners.  

如今，AdWords 已不仅仅是谷歌的一个功能，而是一个庞大的生态系统，为成千上万的企业提供宝贵的流量和潜在客户：事实上，在许多方面，它通过创造一个小企业和初创企业可以与成熟、资金充足的公司竞争的开放市场，帮助实现了广告的普及。AdWords 同时也是为所有搜索内容的网站带来收入的重要来源。去年，我们的面向出版商的项目 AdSense 为众多出版合作伙伴创造了超过50亿美元的收入.

Also in the last year we ventured further into other advertising formats with the acquisition of DoubleClick. This may seem at odds with the value we place on relevant text-based ads. However, we have found that richer ad formats have their place such as video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. In fact, we also now serve video ads on television with our AdSense for TV product. Our goal is to match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience.  

此外，在过去一年中，我们通过收购 DoubleClick 进一步探索了其他广告格式。这可能看起来与我们对相关文本广告所赋予的价值相矛盾。然而，我们发现更丰富的广告格式也有其存在的空间，比如 YouTube 中的视频广告和游戏网站上的动态广告。事实上，我们现在还通过 AdSense for TV 产品在电视上投放视频广告。我们的目标是根据广告商及其受众的目标和需求，匹配最合适的格式和媒介，为广告商和出版商提供服务.

Despite the progress in our advertising systems and the growth of our base of advertisers, I believe there are significant improvements still to be made. While our ad system has powerful features, it is also complex, and can confuse many small and local advertisers whose products and services could be very useful to our users. Furthermore, the presentation formats of our advertisements are not the optimal way to peruse through large numbers of products. In the next decade, I hope we can more effectively incorporate commercial offerings from the tens of millions of businesses worldwide and present them to consumers when and where they are most useful.  

尽管我们的广告系统取得了进展，并且广告客户群不断增长，我相信仍有显著的改进空间。虽然我们的广告系统功能强大，但它也相当复杂，可能会让许多小型和本地广告商感到困惑，而他们的产品和服务对我们的用户可能非常有用。此外，我们广告的呈现格式也不是浏览大量产品的最佳方式。在未来十年中，我希望我们能更有效地整合来自全球数千万家企业的商业产品，并在对消费者最有用的时间和地点将其展示出来.

Within a couple of years of our founding, a number of colleagues and I were starting to hit the limitations of our traditional email clients. Our mailboxes were too big for them to handle speedily and reliably. It was challenging or impossible to have email available and synchronized when switching between different computers and platforms. Furthermore, email access required VPN (virtual private networks) so everyone was always VPN’ing, thereby creating extra security risks. Searching mail was slow, awkward, and cumbersome.  

在我们创立后的几年内，我和一些同事开始遇到传统电子邮件客户端的局限性。我们的邮箱太大，无法快速而可靠地处理。当在不同电脑和平台间切换时，保持邮件的可用性和同步几乎成为了难题。此外，访问邮件需要使用VPN（虚拟私人网络），因此每个人都在不断使用VPN，从而增加了额外的安全风险。搜索邮件既慢又笨拙，极为不便.

By the end of 2001 we had a prototype of Gmail that was used internally. Like several existing services at the time, it was web-based. But unlike those services it was designed for power users with high volumes of email. While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. When Gmail was launched externally, in 2004, other top webmail sites offered 2MB and 4MB mailboxes, less than the size of a single attachment I might find in a message today. Gmail offered 1 Gigabyte at launch, included full-text search, and a host of other features not previously found in webmail. Since then Gmail has continued to push the envelope of email systems, including functionality such as instant messaging, video-conferencing, and offline access (launched in Gmail Labs this past January). Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English.  

到2001年底，我们已经有了一个供内部使用的 Gmail 原型。与当时几项现有服务一样，它基于网络。但与那些服务不同，它是为高频邮件用户设计的。尽管我们最初关注的是内部使用，但很快便发现这对全世界都有价值。2004年 Gmail 对外发布时，其他顶级网邮服务提供的邮箱容量仅为2MB或4MB，甚至比我今天在邮件中遇到的单个附件还小。而 Gmail 则在发布时提供了1GB的容量、全文搜索以及其他一系列以前未见过的功能。从那以后，Gmail 不断突破电子邮件系统的极限，包括即时消息、视频会议和离线访问等功能（这些功能在今年1月于 Gmail Labs 推出）。如今，一些谷歌员工拥有超过25GB的邮件记录，涵盖近10年历史，可在几秒钟内搜索。到你阅读此文时，你应能接收法语邮件并用英语阅读.  

We have found the web-based service model to have significant advantages. But it also comes with its own set of challenges, primarily related to web browsers, which can be slow, unreliable, and unable to function offline. Rather than accept these shortcomings, we have sought to remedy them in a number of ways. We have contributed code and generated revenue for several existing web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, enabling them to invest more in their software. We have also developed extensions such as Google Gears, which allows a browser to function offline.  

我们发现基于网络的服务模式具有显著优势，但也带来了自己的挑战，主要与网页浏览器有关，这些浏览器可能运行缓慢、不够可靠且无法离线工作。我们没有接受这些不足，而是通过多种方式加以改进。我们为 Mozilla Firefox 等现有网页浏览器贡献代码并创造收入，使它们能在软件上投入更多资金。我们还开发了诸如 Google Gears 的扩展程序，使浏览器能够离线工作.

In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered.  

然而，在过去几年中，我们决定对网页浏览器的工作方式进行一些重大架构性改造。例如，我们认为不同的标签页应该隔离在各自的沙箱中，以防某个运行不佳的网站拖垮整个浏览器。我们还认为，为了继续构建出色的网络服务，我们需要比现有浏览器提供更快的 Javascript 性能.

To address these issues we have created a new browser, called Google Chrome. It has a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. There are many other notable features, so I invite you to try it out for yourself. Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. If all goes well, this should be addressed later this year. Of course, this is just the start, and Chrome will continue to evolve. Furthermore, other web browsers have been spurred on by Chrome in areas such as JavaScript performance, making everyone better off.  

为了解决这些问题，我们创建了一款名为谷歌 Chrome 的新浏览器。它采用多进程模型，并配备了我们称之为 V8 的超快 JavaScript 引擎。还有许多其他值得注意的功能，欢迎你亲自试用。Chrome 目前尚未在 Mac 和 Linux 上推出，因此包括我在内的许多人暂时无法经常使用它。如果一切顺利，这一问题预计将在今年晚些时候得到解决。当然，这只是个开始，Chrome 将继续发展。此外，其他网页浏览器在 JavaScript 性能等方面也受到 Chrome 的激励，从而使每个人都受益.

We first created mobile search for Google back in 2000 and then we started to create progressively more tailored and complex mobile offerings. Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. It is possible that this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most “personal” computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. Today, almost a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices — a leading indicator of where the rest of the world will soon be.  

我们最初在2000年为谷歌创建了移动搜索，随后我们开始开发越来越定制化和复杂的移动产品。今天，我口袋中的手机比我在1998年使用的台式电脑更强大。可能今年，联网智能手机的出货量将超过台式电脑。事实上，你最“私人”的电脑——那部随身携带的手机——正是智能手机。如今，日本几乎三分之一的谷歌搜索来自移动设备——这是世界其他地区即将发生变化的领先指标.

However, mobile software development has been challenging. There are different mobile platforms, customized differently to each device and carrier combination. Furthermore, deploying mobile applications can require separate business arrangements with individual carriers and manufacturers. While the rise of app stores from Apple, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, and others as well as the adoption of HTML 5 on mobile platforms have helped, it is still very difficult to provide a service to the largest group of network-connected people in the world.  

然而，移动软件开发一直具有挑战性。存在不同的移动平台，每个平台针对不同设备和运营商的组合有各自的定制。此外，部署移动应用可能需要与各个运营商和制造商单独签订业务协议。尽管来自苹果、诺基亚、RIM、微软等公司的应用商店的兴起以及移动平台上 HTML5 的采用提供了一定帮助，但向世界上最大的联网人群提供服务仍然非常困难.

We acquired the startup Android in 2005 and set about the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. Last year, after a lot of hard work, we released Android to the world. As it is open source, anyone is free to use it and modify it. We look forward to seeing how this open platform will spur greater innovation. Furthermore, Android allows for easy creation of applications which can be deployed on any Android device. To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour.  

我们在2005年收购了初创公司 Android，并确立了一个雄心勃勃的目标，即创建一个允许跨运营商和制造商开放互操作性的新移动操作系统。去年，经过大量努力，我们向全世界发布了 Android。由于它是开源的，任何人都可以自由使用和修改。我们期待看到这一开放平台如何激发更大的创新。此外，Android 允许轻松创建可在任何 Android 设备上部署的应用。截至目前，已有超过1000个应用上传至 Android 市场，包括 Shop Savvy（可以读取条形码并比价）、我们的 Latitude 以及 Guitar Hero World Tour.

The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google’s data centers. It has enabled the growth and processing of increasingly large data sets such as the web, the world’s books, and video. This in turn has allowed problems once considered to be in the fantasy realm of artificial intelligence to come closer to reality.  

过去十年中，计算能力在谷歌数据中心不断扩张的推动下发生了巨大变化。这使得处理包括互联网、世界图书和视频在内的越来越大数据集成为可能。这反过来又使得那些曾被认为只存在于人工智能幻想领域的问题更接近现实.

Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. This is made possible by large computer clusters and vast repositories of monolingual and multilingual texts. This technology also allows us to support translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back.  

谷歌翻译支持1640种语言对之间的自动机器翻译。这得益于大型计算机集群和庞大的单语及多语文本库。这项技术还使我们能够支持翻译搜索，即将查询翻译成另一种语言，再将结果翻译回来.

While the earliest Google Voice Search ran as a crude demo in 2001, today our own speech recognition technology powers GOOG411, the voice search feature of the Google Mobile App, and Google Voice. It, too, takes advantage of large training sets and significant computing capability. Last year, PicasaWeb, our photo hosting site, released face recognition, bringing a technology that is on the cutting edge of computer science to a consumer web service.  

虽然最早的谷歌语音搜索在2001年仅作为一个粗糙的演示运行，但如今我们自主研发的语音识别技术为 GOOG411、谷歌移动应用的语音搜索功能以及谷歌语音提供支持。它同样利用了庞大的训练集和显著的计算能力。去年，我们的图片托管网站 PicasaWeb推出了面部识别功能，将处于计算机科学前沿的技术引入消费者级网络服务.

Just a few months ago we released Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It is amazing how an existing data set typically used for improving search quality can be brought to bear on a seemingly unrelated issue and can help to save lives. I believe this sort of approach can do even more — going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. This is just one example of how large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy.  

就在几个月前，我们发布了 Google Flu Trends，这是一项利用我们的日志数据（在不泄露个人身份信息的前提下）来预测流感发病率，比美国疾病控制中心（CDC）的预估提前数周的服务。令人惊讶的是，一个通常用于提升搜索质量的现有数据集，竟能应用于看似无关的问题，并有助于拯救生命。我相信这种方法还能做得更多——不仅仅是监控，而是推断疾病的潜在原因和治疗方法。这只是一个例子，说明像搜索日志这样的大数据集与强大数据挖掘相结合，既能改善世界，又能保护隐私.

Given the tremendous pace of technology, it is impossible to predict far into the future. However, I think the past decade tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today.  

鉴于技术发展的巨大速度，预测远期未来几乎是不可能的。然而，我认为过去十年给我们提供了一些对未来的预期。计算机的速度将提高100倍，存储成本将降低100倍。许多我们今天称之为人工智能的问题，将成为标准计算能力的一部分，包括图像处理、语音识别和自然语言处理。将会诞生我们今天甚至无法想象的新而惊人的计算能力.

While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. I expect that by using simple yet powerful models of computing such as web services, everyone will be more productive. These tools enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.  

如今，世界上大约一半的人通过电脑和手机在线，但在未来十年，互联网将覆盖更多数十亿人。我预期，借助诸如网络服务这样简单而强大的计算模型，每个人都将变得更高效。这些工具使个人、小团体和小企业能够完成以前只有大公司才能实现的任务，无论是制作和发布电影、推广产品，还是报道战争.

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and a good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today’s children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.  

当我还是孩子时，查找任何资料都需要长途跋涉去当地图书馆，并且需要很大的运气，才能碰上某本正好涉及感兴趣主题的书。今天，我无法想象任何人能在几秒钟内查找任何主题。当前笼罩全球经济的乌云给我们带来了苦难，但等到今天的孩子长大后，这场衰退将成为历史中的一则注脚。然而，从现在到那时我们创造的技术，将定义他们的生活方式.