My father did not have the freedom to pursue the career of his choice in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he produced copious research on dynamical systems, a branch of mathematics, in his spare time. When I was four years old, there was an international conference on the subject in Warsaw—a rare event in any scientific field behind the Iron Curtain. Even though he was not officially allowed to attend and it was challenging to get permission to travel, my father was able to make the trip with the help of supporters in Poland. What he learned there went well beyond mathematics, and dramatically changed the course of our lives.
我父亲在苏联没有自由选择自己职业的权利。然而，他在业余时间大量研究动力系统——数学的一个分支。当我四岁时，华沙召开了一次关于这一主题的国际会议——在铁幕后的任何科学领域中，这都是一次罕见的事件。尽管他官方上不被允许参加，且获得旅行许可非常困难，但在波兰支持者的帮助下，我的父亲还是设法完成了这次旅行。他在那里学到的远远超出了数学范畴，并极大地改变了我们的生活轨迹.
Contrary to what my father had been taught, the mathematicians from the other side of the Iron Curtain were not monsters. They were fellow scientists who shared the same passions. The key difference was that they were free: free to pursue the career of their choice, free to voice their opinions, free to travel, and above all they were free from fear of their own government. That small but powerful piece of information drove my family to flee the Soviet Union two years later and start a new life in the United States.
与我父亲所学到的相反，来自铁幕另一边的数学家并非怪物。他们是志同道合的科学家，共享相同的热情。关键的区别在于他们是自由的：可以自由追求自己选择的职业，可以自由表达意见，可以自由旅行，最重要的是，他们不必畏惧自己的政府。这一小而强大的信息促使我的家人在两年后逃离苏联，并在美国开始了新生活.
Today the vast majority of the world’s population has access to mobile phones, and over two billion people are connected to the Internet. As a result, the trickle of information that made its way into closed societies such as the USSR when I was a child has now become a torrent—and millions of people living under totalitarian regimes are able to glimpse freedom every day of their lives, albeit virtually.
如今，世界绝大多数人口都能使用手机，且超过二十亿人已连接到互联网。因此，当我还是孩子时流入苏联等封闭社会的信息涓涓细流，如今已变成了奔腾的洪流——生活在极权政体下的数百万人每天都能（虽然是虚拟的）窥见自由.
While the trends in technology and communication that made this all possible have been clear for decades, I believe we have now reached an important inflection point. As I write this letter, a wave of change is passing through the Middle East and North Africa. I cannot predict what countries it will touch, or what the state of the world will be by the time you read this in two months. But I can be certain of one thing: access to information will play a key role.
虽然使这一切成为可能的技术与通信趋势几十年来一直十分明显，但我相信我们现在已到达一个重要的转折点。当我写下这封信时，一股变革浪潮正席卷中东和北非。我无法预测它会触及哪些国家，也无法预见两个月后你阅读此信时世界将何种模样，但我可以肯定一件事：信息获取将发挥关键作用.
信息获取
We founded Google to help connect people to the information they need— and we have been obsessively focused on that goal ever since. Today, hundreds of millions of people rely on Google to search through many petabytes of the world’s knowledge. We do it across nations, languages and cultures, for information that’s both online and offline, on PCs and tablets, phones and televisions, with text and images and video and sound... whatever it takes. Over the past year, the whole web experience has become richer, thanks to faster processors and improved software in both client computers and data centers. For example, Google Instant (launched late last year) starts searching with every keystroke, thereby saving users time on every search. To date, Google Instant has now saved our users over 100 billion keystrokes and counting. Going forward, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kind of interactivity one should expect to see in search.
我们创立谷歌是为了帮助人们连接到他们所需要的信息——从那时起，我们便全心投入这一目标。如今，数以亿计的人依赖谷歌在海量（以拍字节计）的全球知识中进行搜索。我们跨越国界、语言和文化搜集信息，无论在线还是离线，无论在电脑、平板、手机还是电视上，以文本、图像、视频和声音……不惜一切代价。在过去一年里，由于客户端电脑和数据中心中处理器速度加快、软件得到改进，整个网络体验变得更加丰富。例如，谷歌即时搜索（去年年底推出）在每次击键时就开始搜索，从而为用户节省了每次搜索的时间。迄今为止，谷歌即时搜索已为用户节省了超过1000亿次击键，而且这一数字还在不断增加。展望未来，这仅仅是搜索互动性所能达到体验的冰山一角.
Because we serve users in nearly every country and 146 languages, the best available information is not always in a language that they understand. To that end, our translation systems have been very important ever since we introduced them five years ago. Google Translate now works in 58 languages including Hindi, Persian and Swahili, and can offer translations between 3,306 language pairs. It’s still far from perfect, but we’ve come a long, long way, thanks to improved algorithms and scaled computing power. For geographic information, we literally cover the globe with imagery from satellites, airplanes, and cars, and we’ve made street maps available of nearly 100 countries.
由于我们服务于几乎每个国家并支持146种语言，最好的信息并不总是以用户能够理解的语言呈现。为此，自从五年前我们推出翻译系统以来，它的重要性不断凸显。如今，谷歌翻译支持包括印地语、波斯语和斯瓦希里语在内的58种语言，并能提供3306种语言对之间的翻译。虽然它仍远未完美，但得益于改进的算法和规模化的计算能力，我们已经走过了漫长的路程。对于地理信息，我们利用卫星、飞机和汽车的图像真正覆盖了全球，并为近100个国家提供了街道地图.
Some of the best information in the world across many cultures was not born on the web, but resides in the world’s books. This is why we launched our books project in 2004 and we’ve now scanned (and enable searchers to discover) more than 15 million books, which we estimate to be more than 10 percent of all the books published since Gutenberg—and we’re still going strong. These books span hundreds of languages and over three million are already available online as Google eBooks. In the past year, we expanded our scanning efforts to encompass other kinds of physical content, such as Yad Vashem’s Holocaust archives, Nelson Mandela’s personal documents, and minutely-detailed scans of some of the world’s greatest paintings as part of the Art Project.
世界上许多跨文化中最优秀的信息并非诞生于网络，而是存在于书籍中。这正是我们于2004年启动图书项目的原因，如今我们已扫描（并使搜索者能够发现）超过1500万本书，我们估计这超过了自古腾堡以来所有出版书籍的10%，而且我们依然蓬勃发展。这些书籍涵盖数百种语言，其中超过300万本已以谷歌电子书的形式在线提供。在过去的一年中，我们扩大了扫描范围，涵盖了其他类型的实体内容，例如雅德瓦谢姆的犹太人大屠杀档案、纳尔逊·曼德拉的个人文件，以及作为艺术项目一部分对一些世界上最伟大画作的极其详细扫描.
A Video is Worth a Million Words
视频胜过百万言语
Sal Khan quit his job as a hedge fund manager to create an online academy on YouTube that tutors people in subjects from mathematics to chemistry. His 2,000 videos have been viewed 45 million times.
Sal Khan 辞去了对冲基金经理的工作，在 YouTube 上创建了一个在线学院，为人们辅导从数学到化学等各科知识。他制作的2000个视频已被观看了4500万次.
There is rarely a more compelling way to capture and convey something than by video, and thanks to advances in processors, networks and storage, video is quickly becoming as ubiquitous as text. YouTube, which is only six years old, now serves over two billion videos per day from a selection of over 500 million. While it may have been known for its “lolcats” videos several years ago, YouTube is now used for citizen engagement (such as interviews with President Obama), documenting human rights violations (such as in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya), full-length movies, education, and much more.
几乎没有比视频更能生动捕捉和传达信息的方式了，得益于处理器、网络和存储技术的进步，视频正迅速变得与文本一样无处不在。仅有六年历史的 YouTube，如今每天提供超过20亿个视频，视频库中拥有超过5亿个视频。几年前，它或许以“搞笑猫咪”视频而闻名，但如今 YouTube 已被用于公民参与（例如对奥巴马总统的采访）、记录人权侵犯（例如在突尼斯、埃及和利比亚）、全长电影、教育等诸多用途.
Although it seemed a dream a decade ago, today YouTube enables viewers to watch what they want, when they want, on the device of their choosing, and to post their own videos for the world to see. The ability to easily publish video has leveled the playing field between the select few and the rest of the world in terms of being able to communicate using this powerful medium.
尽管十年前这看似梦想，今天 YouTube 让观众能够在自己选择的设备上随时观看所想看的内容，并发布自己的视频供全世界观看。轻松发布视频的能力使得少数精英与世界其他人之间在利用这一强大媒介进行沟通方面的竞争环境趋于平等.
Power in Every Pocket
人人口袋中的力量
Nearly 10 percent of YouTube playbacks now happen on mobile phones, which is remarkable given the technical hurdles that needed to be overcome in order to stream video to small, low-power wireless devices. Increasingly, technology is moving to the world’s five-billion-plus mobile phones, thereby democratizing information well beyond the PC. The more sophisticated functionality is typically available on the fast-growing smartphone segment, which shipped over 300 million devices last year alone. Android, our own mobile operating system for smartphones, first shipped only two years ago, and now it’s the most used in the world with over 300,000 devices activated daily. New Internet-connected screens, such as tablets and televisions, also provide an ever-growing base to deploy these technologies.
如今，近10%的 YouTube 播放发生在手机上，这在技术上非常了不起，因为要将视频流传输到小型、低功耗的无线设备上必须克服重重技术难关。技术正日益向全球超过50亿部手机转移，从而使信息民主化，远远超出电脑的范畴。更复杂的功能通常出现在增长迅速的智能手机领域，仅去年这一领域就出货超过3亿部设备。我们自己的智能手机操作系统 Android 仅在两年前首次发布，如今已成为全球使用最广的系统，每天激活设备超过30万部。新型互联网连接屏幕，如平板电脑和电视，也为部署这些技术提供了不断增长的基础.
And new mobile applications are springing up everywhere. Just a few years ago mapping and navigation were the domain of specialized devices. Today, more than 150 million people use Google Maps every month on their mobile phones, and nearly 10 million now use Google Latitude to connect with their friends and families on maps.
而且，新型移动应用正如雨后春笋般涌现。几年前，地图和导航还是专用设备的专属领域。如今，每个月有超过1.5亿人使用手机上的 Google Maps，而近1000万人使用 Google Latitude 在地图上与朋友和家人保持联系.
Moreover, via mobile phones, what were once considered the far-flung corners of artificial intelligence research have now reached the mainstream. For example, Google Goggles utilizes leading edge machine vision to identify and learn more about objects and places by sight. Our Voice Actions feature enables millions of people to use state of the art speech recognition to more easily interact with their phones to dictate emails or searches. With Google Translate on mobile phones, people can now—literally—speak in one language and have it repeated in another.
此外，通过手机，那些曾被认为是人工智能研究边缘的领域如今已步入主流。例如，Google Goggles 利用尖端机器视觉技术，通过视觉识别来识别并了解物体和地点。我们的语音操作功能使数百万人能够使用最先进的语音识别技术，更轻松地与手机互动，进行邮件或搜索的语音输入。借助手机上的谷歌翻译，人们现在可以——字面上地——用一种语言讲话，并将其翻译成另一种语言.
Making a Living Online
在线谋生
A panama hat maker in Bolivia is now selling in 84 markets and has grown to 50 employees across Latin America using AdWords.
玻利维亚的一位巴拿马帽制造商如今利用 AdWords 在84个市场销售，并在整个拉丁美洲拥有50名员工.
The owner of a baby products store in Nigeria had such a response to her AdWords campaign that she literally ran out of stock.
尼日利亚一家婴儿用品店的老板对她的 AdWords 活动反应热烈，以至于她的库存竟然售罄.
A butcher in Warsaw using AdWords saw that at Easter, one of the busiest times of the year, the queue of people who came to pick up their online orders was longer than the queue of those shopping in the store.
华沙的一位肉贩利用 AdWords 发现，在复活节——一年中最繁忙的时段之一——前来取在线订单的顾客排队的长度比进店购物的人还长.
Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the founder of a fitness bootcamp was able to completely rebuild, and then grow, his customer base with AdWords when he returned to New Orleans and started over.
受卡特里娜飓风影响而流离失所的一位健身训练营创始人在回到新奥尔良重建后，利用 AdWords 完全重塑并扩大了他的客户群.
Using AdWords to find new customers in the wake of the recession, a son helped his father turn around his ailing home security business, now the largest in El Paso.
在经济衰退之后，一位儿子利用 AdWords 帮助他父亲扭转了濒临破产的家庭安保业务，如今该业务已成为埃尔帕索最大的家庭安保企业.
The first Thai AdWords customer, a third-generation tailor, has grown his business from 5,000 customers in 2002 to over 400,000 internationally today.
第一位使用 AdWords 的泰国客户——一位第三代裁缝，已将他的业务从2002年的5000名客户发展到如今国际上超过40万名客户.
The technology revolution also has an economic impact: it is enabling more and more people globally to make a living for themselves entirely online. Worldwide, more than one million advertisers are now using AdWords—and it’s transforming the fortunes of businesses at every scale. There are countless examples of entrepreneurs building and growing businesses with AdWords as their sole marketing vehicle, reaching new markets and finding new customers throughout the world with just a couple of clicks.
技术革命同样具有经济影响：它使全球越来越多的人能够完全在线谋生. 全球已有超过一百万广告主使用 AdWords——这正在改变各规模企业的命运. 有无数例子表明，企业家利用 AdWords 作为唯一的营销工具建立并发展业务，仅需点击几下就能进入新市场、找到新客户遍及全球.
Ads also enable publishers of all types to fund content creation and make that content available for free. The AdSense program now generates revenue for over two million publishers worldwide. In 2010, we gave back over $6 billion to our AdSense partners, who range from well-known newspapers to bloggers and niche websites.
广告还使各类出版商能够资助内容创作，并使这些内容免费向公众提供. 如今，AdSense 项目为全球超过两百万的出版商带来收入. 2010年，我们向我们的 AdSense 合作伙伴返还了超过60亿美元，这些合作伙伴涵盖了从知名报纸到博客和细分网站.
Communication for All
全民沟通
Technology has also democratized communication and creation of information. Capabilities that were once available only to the largest corporations are now available to businesses, political movements, governments, and individuals alike. There is no longer a need to manage servers, updates, and patches; instead, users simply refresh their browser. In addition to Gmail, our most-used communications app, our broader suite of apps is now used by over three million businesses and 10 million students.
技术也使沟通和信息创作民主化. 曾经只有最大公司才能拥有的能力，现在企业、政治运动、政府以及个人均可获得. 再也不需要管理服务器、更新和补丁；用户只需刷新浏览器. 除了 Gmail——我们使用最频繁的通信应用之外，我们的其他应用套件现在被超过300万家企业和1000万名学生使用.
Personal communications are increasingly complicated to manage, given the volume of email people receive. Launching Priority Inbox, which uses machine learning to rank and prioritize emails, we started to tackle this problem. We’re encouraged by indications that show its utility. Priority Inbox users spend 43 percent more time reading important mail compared to unimportant, and 15 percent less time reading email overall, compared to Gmail users who don’t use Priority Inbox.
考虑到人们收到的邮件数量，个人通信的管理变得日益复杂. 我们推出了 Priority Inbox，它利用机器学习对邮件进行排序和优先级划分，从而开始解决这一问题. 显示其效用的迹象令我们倍感鼓舞. Priority Inbox 用户在阅读重要邮件时所花的时间比阅读不重要邮件多43%，而总体阅读邮件的时间则比不使用 Priority Inbox 的 Gmail 用户少15%.
After a server crash took down its website, a city in Florida moved their site to Google Apps, which has given them more time to focus on open government initiatives like live-streaming city council meetings on YouTube.
在一次服务器崩溃导致其网站瘫痪后，佛罗里达的一座城市将其网站迁移至 Google Apps，从而获得了更多时间专注于开放政府计划，例如在 YouTube 上直播市议会会议.
Insightly, a one-person software business in Perth, Australia, acquired more than 10,000 customers in its first seven months thanks to the Google Apps Marketplace.
澳大利亚珀斯的一家独立软件公司 Insightly 在其最初的七个月内借助 Google Apps Marketplace 获得了超过1万个客户.
What’s Next?
接下来是什么?
Larry and I have always shared a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the world a better place. It’s why we’ve been prepared, from the get-go, to place big bets on new technologies—with the full knowledge that not all of these will always pay off. In the last year we have seen Google Wave fail, but our browser Chrome has succeeded beyond what we thought was possible. As always, we learn as much from our failures as our successes, and are constantly reminded that execution and delivery matter as much as great ideas.
Larry 和我一直深信科技具有使世界变得更美好的潜力. 这就是为什么从一开始我们就准备在新技术上大举下注——我们充分认识到，并非所有下注都会成功. 在过去的一年中，我们见证了 Google Wave 的失败，但我们的浏览器 Chrome 的成功远超我们的预期. 一如既往，我们从失败中学到的与成功同样多，并不断被提醒，执行和交付与伟大理念同样重要.
Chrome (Google’s web browser) was released two and a half years ago. Today, at version 10 Chrome is over six times faster than it was then and over 120 million people now use it. What’s more, it’s helping push browser standards forward everywhere.
Chrome（谷歌的网页浏览器）是在两年半前发布的. 如今，Chrome 版本10的速度比当时快了六倍以上，并且现有超过1.2亿人使用它. 更重要的是，它正在推动全球浏览器标准的前进.
For the last decade, Eric has done an unbelievable job as CEO steering Google through rapid growth, while also managing two willful founders.
在过去的十年中，Eric 作为首席执行官引领谷歌快速成长，同时还管理着两位固执的创始人，表现令人难以置信.
Clever, strategic, wise... it’s hard to think of anyone on the planet who could have done a better job than Eric has, and we would both like to thank him from the bottom of our hearts. The good news is that as Larry takes over as Chief Executive (again!), Eric is still very much involved as Executive Chairman, and all three of us are just as excited about the next 10 years as we were about the last decade.
聪明、战略、睿智……很难想象地球上还有谁能比 Eric 做得更好，我们衷心感谢他. 好消息是，随着 Larry 再次接任首席执行官，Eric 仍然深度参与担任执行董事长，我们三个人对未来十年的期待与对过去十年的热情一样高.
The Internet, mobile phones, and other technologies are having profound effects on the spread of information and the lives of people worldwide. It’s a virtuous circle, with the information revolution directly accelerating the pace of technical development as inventors and entrepreneurs benefit from the increased demand for new products, the opening of new markets and dramatic gains in productivity. As a result, new technologies that emerge from research labs fall into the hands of users within a few years; new online offerings reach tens of millions of people in months; and startups spring up overnight.
互联网、手机及其他技术正在对信息传播和全球人们的生活产生深远影响. 这是一个良性循环，信息革命直接加速了技术发展的步伐，因为发明家和企业家受益于对新产品需求的增加、新市场的开放以及生产力的显著提升. 因此，从研究实验室涌现的新技术在数年内便传到用户手中；新的在线产品在数月内触及数千万用户；而初创企业则一夜之间冒出.
Decades ago, my father had to make a journey to Poland for the information that would shape my family’s life. Today, billions of people can make that journey online every day—and the world will never look the same. In the coming years, technology will evolve even more rapidly, and what is still science fiction today will have worldwide impact almost overnight.
几十年前，我的父亲不得不前往波兰获取将塑造我家庭生活的信息. 如今，数十亿人每天都能在线完成这段旅程——世界将永远不同. 在未来几年中，技术将发展得更加迅速，而今天仍属于科幻的事物几乎一夜之间便会产生全球影响.