2025-06-29 Acquired.Google

Refer To：《2025-06-29 Acquired.Google》。

Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

Ben: All right David, last episode we are doing in our studios before Radio City.

Ben：好吧，David，这是我们在演播室录制的最后一期节目，之后就要去无线电城音乐厅了。

David: Ooh, that’s right.

David：哦，没错。

Ben: How do you feel?

Ben：你感觉如何？

David: We’re about to go from the stage of one—very, very small audience of one—to the very, very big stage.

David：我们即将从只有一个观众——非常非常小的舞台——走向一个非常非常大的舞台。

Ben: Where if we make a mistake, no one will notice. We just rerecord it and it’s like it never happened.

Ben：在那里如果我们出错，没人会注意到。我们只需重新录制，就好像什么都没发生过。

David: We should try that at Radio City. Just be like, ah, strike that. Let’s take that again.

David：我们应该在无线电城试试这样。就说：“啊，把那段删掉，重新来一遍。”

Ben: Yeah. Hey, this is authentically Acquired, you guys. This is how we do it. You’re going to look at the inside. Probably not, though. All right, let’s do it.

Ben：对。嘿，伙计们，这就是纯正的《Acquired》。我们就是这么做的。你们将看到幕后——虽然可能看不到。好了，开始吧。

David: Let’s do it.

David：开始吧。

Ben: Welcome to the summer 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I’m Ben Gilbert.

Ben：欢迎来到《Acquired》2025年夏季特别季——这是一档讲述伟大公司及其背后故事与策略的播客。我是 Ben Gilbert。

David: I’m David Rosenthal.

David：我是 David Rosenthal。

Ben: And we are your hosts. Artificial intelligence is the story of our time. It is definitively the next trillion-dollar technology wave after PCs, the Internet and mobile. To understand AI, you have to understand the company most responsible for its technical foundation and the wave that came before it—Google.

Ben：我们是你们的主持人。人工智能是我们这个时代的故事，它无疑是继个人电脑、互联网和移动之后的下一个万亿美元技术浪潮。要理解 AI，就必须了解对其技术基础以及之前浪潮影响最大的公司——Google。

This episode begins our multi-part Google saga. Finally, as I’m sure many of you out there are saying right now, Google has been the front door to the entire internet for 25 years now, a quarter of a century. But it wasn’t always this way.

本期节目开启我们多期的 Google 长篇系列。终于，我们知道很多听众现在肯定在想，Google 作为整个互联网的前门已经存在了 25 年、整整四分之一个世纪。但事情并非一直如此。

David: No, it was not.

David：的确不是。

Ben: Back in 1998 when Google was founded, there were a dozen other search engines that already existed, and there were a variety of different business models, most of which were not very interesting.

Ben：早在 1998 年 Google 刚成立时，市面上已有十几个搜索引擎，并且存在各种各样的商业模式，但大多数都不太吸引人。

David: None of which were very interesting.

David：没有一个特别吸引人。

Ben: So today, we will try to answer the question, why did Google work, and once it did, how did it go from clever technology and nice product to the single greatest business of all time.

Ben：所以今天，我们会尝试回答一个问题：为什么 Google 能成功？一旦成功，它又是如何从一项巧妙的技术和出色的产品，成长为有史以来最伟大的商业帝国？

I’m not being facetious, listeners. Google, and I should say Alphabet today, generates more net income or profit than any other US company, more than Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, J.P. Morgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway. This is a cash gusher.

我并不是在开玩笑，听众们。Google——如今应称为 Alphabet——创造的净利润比任何其他美国公司都多，超过苹果、微软、埃克森美孚、摩根大通和伯克希尔·哈撒韦。这是一台现金喷泉。

It is (a) super high gross margin, (b) in a giant market, and (c) according to the US government as of today, they are a monopoly in that market with 90% market share. That is three enormous numbers multiplied together to create that most profitable company in the US stat that I threw out earlier.

其原因是：(a) 超高的毛利率；(b) 巨大的市场规模；(c) 按照美国政府目前的说法，他们在该市场拥有 90% 的份额，构成垄断。这三个巨大的数字相乘，就造就了我先前提到的“美国最赚钱公司”这一统计数据。

David: Well, I’m glad we don’t need to get to the government and all that until much, much later in our series. But yeah, this is the creation of the most beautiful business of all time.

David：嗯，我很高兴我们要到本系列的很后面才讨论政府等话题。但没错，这确实是有史以来最优美商业模式的诞生。

Ben: And Google’s market position has been seemingly unassailable at least until really this year, until the AI wars really heated up.

Ben：谷歌的市场地位看似牢不可破，至少在今年之前如此，直到 AI 大战真正升温。

Of course, it was that clean user experience that everyone talks about with just a search box on the homepage, and the focus on the users, and the high quality fast search that spread virally through word of mouth. But a good product is far from the only reason that Google became dominant.

当然，人人称道的简洁用户体验——主页上只有一个搜索框——以及对用户的专注和通过口碑病毒式传播的高速高质量搜索，都功不可没。但仅凭优秀产品远不足以让 Google 称霸。

Today, we’ll tell the story of why Google was nowhere near the first search engine. It was the last.

今天，我们将讲述为什么 Google 远非第一个搜索引擎，而是最后一个搜索引擎的故事。

David: Well, you know Microsoft may take a little issue with that with Bing, but only a little issue.

David：嗯，你知道微软可能会因 Bing 而对此略有意见，但也只是略有意见。

Ben: A little. A few percentage points issue.

Ben：一点点。几个百分点的差距。

David: A few percentage points of issue, yeah.

David：几个百分点的问题，没错。

Ben: Well listeners, if you want to know every time an episode drops, check out our email list. It is also the only place where we will share a hint at what our next episode will be, share corrections, updates, little tidbits we learned from previous episodes. That’s acquired.fm/email.

Ben：各位听众，如果你想在每期节目上线时第一时间知晓，请订阅我们的邮件列表。那里也是我们唯一会提前透露下一期节目的地方，还会分享勘误、更新以及我们从往期节目中学到的小花絮。网址是 acquired.fm/email。

After this episode, join the Slack to talk about this with us and the whole Acquired community, acquired.fm/slack.

本期节目结束后，欢迎加入 Slack，与我们和整个 Acquired 社区讨论，链接是 acquired.fm/slack。

If you want more Acquired between each episode, check out AQC2, our interview show where we talk with founders and CEOs building businesses in areas we’ve covered on the show. The most recent was with Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas.

如果你想在两期正片之间获得更多 Acquired 内容，可以收听 AQC2 访谈节目，在那里我们与在节目中曾讨论过领域的创始人和 CEO 交流。最新一期嘉宾是萨凡纳香蕉队的 Jesse Cole。

David, that was the most fun I’ve ever had recording basically any podcast episode.

David，那是我录过的几乎所有播客中最有趣的一次。

David: It was bananas. It was awesome.

David：真是疯狂，太棒了。

Ben: Yes. Well, before we dive in, we want to briefly thank our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan Payments.

Ben：是的。在深入主题之前，我们想简要感谢本期呈现合作伙伴——摩根大通支付。

David: As you all know, J.P. Morgan is our partner for our big Radio City show coming up on July 15th. We’ve been hard at work preparing. It’s going to be an amazing night. The show is basically sold out. I think there are less than 100 tickets remaining right now out of the 6000 total. If you haven’t grabbed yours yet, go do it right now or they will all be gone.

David：众所周知，摩根大通是我们将于 7 月 15 日在无线电城音乐厅举行盛大演出的合作伙伴。我们一直在紧锣密鼓地准备，那将是一个精彩的夜晚。演出几乎售罄，总共 6000 张门票现在只剩不到 100 张。如果你还没买，现在就去，不然就会被抢完。

J.P. Morgan will be showing off all their latest and greatest payments tech there. We’ll have exclusive merch, a fan meetup before the show, an after party, and an encore event the next day at the New York Stock Exchange. Details on all of that are in the Acquired Slack. We’re so pumped.

届时，摩根大通将在现场展示他们最新、最棒的支付技术。我们将推出独家周边，演出前有粉丝见面会，演出后有派对，第二天还将在纽约证券交易所举行安可活动。所有细节都在 Acquired Slack 上。我们已经迫不及待了。

Ben: We cannot wait to see you there. With that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

Ben：我们迫不及待想在现场见到各位。顺便声明，本节目不构成投资建议。David 和我可能持有我们讨论的公司股票，本节目仅供信息与娱乐之用。

David Rosenthal, when is the first time any human being searched for anything ever?

David Rosenthal，人类第一次进行任何搜索是什么时候？

David: I have no idea. That’s a great question.

David：我完全不知道。那真是个好问题。

Ben: Not that far back. Where do we start?

Ben：并不用追溯得那么久远。我们从哪里开始讲起？

David: Well, you know what? We should ask Google. But to do that we need to tell the story of Google. That story starts in March of 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, where Larry Page is born as the second child and second son to Carl and Gloria Page. Larry, of course, grows up in Lansing because his dad, Carl Page Sr, is a professor of computer science in nearby East Lansing at Michigan State University.

David：嗯，你知道吗？我们应该去问 Google。但要做到这一点，我们得先讲 Google 的故事。这个故事始于 1973 年 3 月，在密歇根州兰辛市，拉里·佩奇作为 Carl 与 Gloria Page 的第二个孩子、第二个儿子出生。当然，拉里在兰辛长大，因为他的父亲 Carl Page Sr. 是密歇根州立大学（位于附近的东兰辛）的计算机科学教授。

Now, before my dad who went to MSU and is an MSU alum gets too excited here, I regret to inform him, my dad, and you, Ben, that Carl got his PhD from Michigan. I’m sorry about that.

在我的父亲——一位密歇根州立大学校友——过于兴奋之前，我得遗憾地告诉他、告诉你，以及告诉你，Ben，Carl 是在密歇根大学拿到博士学位的。对此我表示抱歉。

Ben: And would send his son there as well.

Ben：而且他还把自己的儿子也送去了那里。

David: Both of his sons, Unfortunately, Larry’s mom also went to Michigan, also got a CS degree there, and also teaches programming as a programming instructor at MSU.

David：他把两个儿子都送去了。不巧的是，拉里的母亲也就读于密歇根大学，同样获得了计算机科学学位，而且还在 MSU 任教，担任编程讲师。

Ben: Pretty Michigan-heavy.

Ben：挺“密歇根”味儿十足的。

David: Pretty Michigan-heavy, but pretty amazing childhood in the early mid-70s here for Larry and his older brother. Maybe not unique. I’m sure there were a few other households in America in the world that grew up with both of their parents steeped in computers as computer science professors, but really pretty unique.

David：确实非常“密歇根”，但对拉里和他的哥哥来说，在 70 年代初中期有这样非凡的童年非常了不起。也许并非绝无仅有，我相信美国乃至世界上还有极少数家庭，父母都是计算机科学教授并沉浸在计算机世界中，但仍然非常罕见。

Ben: Incredibly unique. Are you kidding me? Larry Page grew up with two computer science academics as parents in the 70s, which would’ve meant that his parents would’ve needed to start in the 50s. Very, very few households.

Ben：极其罕见。你在开玩笑吗？拉里·佩奇在 70 年代与两位计算机科学学者父母一起长大，也就是说，他的父母早在 50 年代就已经投身这一领域。这样的家庭少之又少。

David: Right at the same time as the PC era is coming online, and Microsoft, to just have that be your air, your daily existence growing up as a kid. How incredible is that?

David：正值个人电脑时代来临、微软等公司崛起，这样的氛围成为你成长过程中的日常，简直不可思议。

Ben: Amazing.

Ben：太不可思议了。

David: Even more so for future Google to come for the 1979 to 1980 academic year when Larry is six and seven years old. His dad does a sabbatical year at Stanford. The whole family goes out and lives in Palo Alto, and Stanford and early Silicon Valley there, makes a big impression on young Larry.

David：更重要的是，谷歌未来的萌芽可以追溯到 1979 至 1980 学年，当时年仅六七岁的拉里随父亲到斯坦福大学度过学术休假，全家搬到帕洛阿尔托居住；斯坦福校园和早期硅谷的氛围给年幼的拉里留下了深刻印象。

Then he continues to be influenced by this, because I mentioned his older brother, Carl Jr, who’s nine years older than him, Carl goes to Michigan, majors in CS just like Larry would. Then when he graduates, he goes out to the West coast, actually to the Pacific Northwest, and he works fairly early at Microsoft and then Mentor Graphics down in Oregon. Carl Jr would ultimately also come down to Silicon Valley and play a little role in this story as we will see in a little bit.

接着，这种影响还在延续。我刚才提到他大九岁的哥哥 Carl Jr，他后来也去了密歇根大学学计算机科学。毕业后，他前往西海岸——确切说是太平洋西北地区，先在微软早期就职，随后又到俄勒冈州的 Mentor Graphics 工作。稍后我们将看到，Carl Jr 最终也来到硅谷，在这个故事里扮演了小小的角色。

But back to Larry here. Part of the reason I say all this, and I want to include Sergey too in what I’m about to say, even though we haven’t introduced him yet in the story, I think there’s this perception today that Larry and Sergey were these bumbling academic guys, who weren’t really business minded, and Google was a research project, and this all happened by accident that they built the best business of all time. Absolutely freaking not. We want to dispel that notion right now.

回到拉里本人。我之所以铺垫这一大段，也想把谢尔盖算进来——虽然后面才正式介绍他——是因为如今很多人误以为拉里和谢尔盖只是两个笨拙的学究，没有商业头脑，谷歌不过是个研究项目，后来偶然成为史上最佳商业模式。绝对不是这样。我们现在就要打破这个误解。

One of the things we heard over and over again talking to people in research is how hugely ambitious the two of them were, not just for the products they were building but for Google for the business. Larry’s a different generation and a very different personality than Mark Zuckerberg, but you should think about his ambition and his desire to build a huge, world-changing company at the same level as him.

我们在采访许多研究圈人士时反复听到的一点是，这两个人雄心勃勃，不仅对他们正在打造的产品如此，对谷歌这家公司更是如此。虽然拉里与马克·扎克伯格身处不同世代、性格迥异，但如果比较雄心与改变世界的抱负，他俩其实在同一水平线上。

Ben: To your point, Google did not happen by accident. Or another reasonable comparison, the generation before Bill Gates. I think they publicly—Larry and Sergey—don’t get the same ethos that those two get, but the same fire was there.

Ben：正如你所说，谷歌并非偶然现象。或者拿比尔·盖茨那一代来做个合理对比。我觉得公众并没有把拉里和谢尔盖赋予与那两位同样的创业精神光环，但他们拥有同样的热情。

David: Larry would say later, this is a quote from him, “Probably when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually. I wanted to make the world better. In order to do that, you need to do more than just invent things.” He would say another time later, “You need to use business and entrepreneurship to make these things real. It’s not enough just to invent them.”

David：拉里后来曾说过——我引用他的原话——“大概在十二岁时，我就知道自己终将创办一家公司。我想让世界变得更好，要做到这一点，仅仅发明东西还不够。”他还说过，“你需要借助商业和创业精神让这些发明落地，仅仅发明是不够的。”

Ben: He’s alluding to two things there. One is companies are the vehicles by which you bring ideas to the masses. Two is in a capitalist society, a company is the vehicle that can accumulate profits, which then you can reinvest to build something of your great scale and ambition.

Ben：他暗示了两件事。第一，企业是把创意带给大众的载体；第二，在资本主义社会里，企业是能够积累利润的工具，让你得以再投资，去打造符合自己宏大规模与雄心的事业。

David: Larry got this all along and Sergey did too.

David：拉里一直明白这一点，谢尔盖也是如此。

As we all know, Larry goes to Michigan undergrad, he graduates in 1995, and then he goes off to Stanford to get his PhD in computer science where has a fateful meeting with his business partner-friend-soulmate, Sergey Brin.

众所周知，拉里在密歇根大学完成本科，于 1995 年毕业，随后前往斯坦福大学攻读计算机科学博士，并在那里与他的商业伙伴、朋友兼灵魂伴侣谢尔盖·布林命运相遇。

Ben: And isn’t the way this all went down that Larry was visiting and Sergey was already in the program. I think Sergey was leading some tour to try to sell Larry on joining the program. Larry is, even though he is the new guy there, he’s challenging Sergey at every little corner he’s bringing up.

Ben：事情经过大概是这样的：拉里来参观，谢尔盖已经在这个项目里。我记得谢尔盖带队参观，想说服拉里加入。尽管拉里是新人，但谢尔盖提到的每一点他都要挑战。

‘Wouldn’t a better system be this?’ And they’re talking about cities and transportation and civic design. They’re almost like bickering back and forth in this verbal sparring of who’s smarter even though they just met. That’s the story that I read and, I don’t know, what did you and I read? Probably six or seven books between us on the history of Google.

“采用这种更好的系统不是更好吗？”他们讨论城市、交通和市政设计，几乎一见面就展开口头较量，互相拌嘴，看谁更聪明。我看过这样的故事——咱俩一共读了多少本谷歌历史书？加起来大概六七本吧。

David: Many, many versions of this story out there. As I was doing the research, I talked to one of our good friends, Anna Patterson, who has been in the Google orbit for a very long time. She was an early employee, left, started a company Google reacquired, was a VP of engineering there for a long time. She told me another little bit of this story that has never (I think) before been told publicly.

David：这个故事有许多版本。我做研究时采访了我们的好友 Anna Patterson，她在谷歌生态中浸淫已久。她是早期员工，离开后创办公司又被谷歌收购，随后长期担任工程副总裁。她告诉了我一个此前（我想）从未公开的故事细节。

Well, it turns out Anna was a postdoc at Stanford at this time, and she’s the one who organized this new student’s weekend. She organized Larry and Sergey meeting. She told me that the first night of the weekend, so the first event, the first time that they actually met was at drinks at the British Bankers Club in Menlo Park.

原来，那时 Anna 在斯坦福做博士后，是她组织了那次新生周末活动；正是她安排了拉里和谢尔盖的会面。她告诉我，在周末第一晚、第一场活动、也就是他们第一次真正在一起的时候，是在门洛帕克的 British Bankers Club 喝酒。

This magical friendship—bickering back and forth but real partnership—was started there and it was already going that night. Larry and Sergey end up shutting the bar down that night, and another famous local Stanford alum picks up the tab for the group. Can you guess who that person was?

这段神奇的友谊——虽然拌嘴却是真正的伙伴关系——就此萌芽，并在那一夜迅速升温。那晚拉里和谢尔盖几乎把酒吧喝到打烊，随后一位当地著名的斯坦福校友为全场买单。你能猜到那是谁吗？

Ben: I don’t know. Lay it on me.

Ben：我不知道，告诉我吧。

David: Charles Schwab.

David：查尔斯·施瓦布。

Ben: No way.

Ben：不可能吧。

David: Yup. Apparently lived locally in the area, went to the British Bankers Club all the time, and he’d do this. He’d just see Stanford students there and be like, I got you guys.

David：没错。据说他就住在附近，经常光顾 British Bankers Club，每次看到斯坦福学生都会说：“这顿我请。”

Ben: That’s awesome. So Charles Schwab funded the first date of Larry and Sergey.

Ben：太棒了。所以查尔斯·施瓦布资助了拉里和谢尔盖的第一次“约会”。

David: Yeah, amazing. And Charles Schwab accounts would go on to hold billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of Google stock because of that.

David：是的，太神奇了。后来查尔斯·施瓦布的客户账户因此持有了数十亿、数十亿、再数十亿美元的谷歌股票。

Ben: Funny.

Ben：真有趣。

David: Amazing. But yes, I think the spirit of all these stories is true. It was an instant electric friendship-partnership between the two of them. And that would carry on forever. They shared an office at Google. I don’t think we’ve really covered founders before that were true partners in the way that Larry and Sergey are. Maybe reminds me a little bit of you and me.

David：不可思议。不过没错，这些故事的精髓都是真的。他们二人之间瞬间形成了电光火石般的友谊与伙伴关系，并一直延续至今。他们在谷歌共用一个办公室。我想我们之前还未讲过像拉里与谢尔盖这样真正平等的创始人伙伴。也许让我有点想到你和我。

Ben: On a very different scale, yes.

Ben：虽然规模完全不同，但没错。

David: On a very different scale.

David：规模确实天差地别。

Ben: But that’s interesting. Equal co-founders. I’m wracking my brain, maybe Bill Gates and Paul Allen? But even then it became very clear very quickly, Bill Gates is the guy. That was reflected in their equity ownership.

Ben：但这很有意思。平等的联合创始人。我绞尽脑汁想，或许有比尔·盖茨和保罗·艾伦？可即便如此，很快就清楚比尔·盖茨才是核心，这也体现在他们的股权结构上。

David: Exactly. I’m sure we’ve covered other companies where there were equal equity ownership amongst founders, but where it was a real true partnership, one plus one equaled 100.

David：正是如此。我确信我们讲过其他创始人股权相等的公司，但真正做到“1+1=100”的深度伙伴关系却凤毛麟角。

Ben: It’s fascinating. Maybe Jensen, Curtis, and Chris at NVIDIA. But over time, it became Jensen. Yeah, you’re right. This is unique for us to be covering true founder-partners that made it decades together.

Ben：很吸引人。或许英伟达的 Jensen、Curtis 和 Chris？但随着时间推移，还是以 Jensen 为主。没错，你说得对。我们难得能够讲到真正携手数十年的创始人伙伴。

David: Even Warren and Charlie, Charlie was never full-time at Berkshire Hathaway.

David：就连沃伦和查理，查理也从未在伯克希尔哈撒韦全职工作。

Ben: And certainly owned way less.

Ben：而且他的持股也少得多。

David: The closest I can think of is maybe Capital Cities with Tom Murphy and Dan Burke.

David：我能想到最接近的例子，可能是 Capital Cities 的汤姆·墨菲和丹·伯克。

Ben: It’s really interesting.

Ben：这真的很有意思。

David: Okay, so Sergey, what’s his story? Sergey was also born in 1973, a few months later in August, in some place even colder than Michigan, Moscow, which of course then was part of the Soviet Union. Sergey’s family was Jewish. Soviet Union was not exactly a great time and place to be Jewish or probably to really be anything there.

David：好了，那谢尔盖的故事是什么？谢尔盖同样出生于 1973 年，稍晚几个月，在 8 月，地点比密歇根更寒冷——莫斯科，当时还属于苏联。谢尔盖一家是犹太人。在苏联当犹太人并非好时机，或许当任何人都不算好。

His family lived in a three-room apartment in Moscow in what I assume was state-allocated housing. They shared it with his paternal grandmother. But his dad was an extremely talented mathematician.

他们一家住在莫斯科一套三居室里，我想是国家分配的住房，并与他的祖母同住。但他父亲是一位极具天赋的数学家。

When Sergey’s four years old, his dad attends an international mathematics conference—this is 1977–1978—and realizes, oh, I got to get my family to the west. We got to get out of here.

当谢尔盖四岁时，他父亲参加了一次国际数学会议——大约在 1977–1978 年——并意识到：哦，我得把家人带到西方，我们必须离开这里。

It takes them two years to be able to emigrate out of the Soviet Union. but they eventually come to the US. His dad becomes a math professor at the University of Maryland. His mom becomes a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

他们花了两年才得以从苏联移民出去，但最终来到了美国。他父亲成为马里兰大学的数学教授，母亲则在 NASA 戈达德太空飞行中心任研究员。

Ben: So Larry’s parents are both computer science professors. Sergey’s dad is a math professor and his mom works for NASA.

Ben：所以拉里的父母都是计算机科学教授，而谢尔盖的父亲是数学教授，母亲则在 NASA 工作。

David: Yes.

David：是的。

Ben: The pool is small of people with backgrounds like that in the 80s.

Ben：在 80 年代拥有那样背景的人本就屈指可数。

David: As you would imagine, Sergey’s very precocious. He graduates high school at age 16, goes to the University of Maryland, gets his undergrad degree in both math and computer science in three years, graduates at age 19, and then of course gets into Stanford for his PhD. Do you know what he did in the summer before coming to Stanford?

David：正如你所想，谢尔盖非常早熟。他 16 岁高中毕业，进入马里兰大学，只用三年就取得数学和计算机科学双学位，19 岁本科毕业，然后顺理成章考入斯坦福读博士。你知道他来斯坦福前那个暑假做了什么吗？

Ben: I have no idea.

Ben：我毫无头绪。

David: He interned at Wolfram Research.

David：他在 Wolfram Research 实习。

Ben: No way. Really?

Ben：不会吧，真的吗？

David: Yeah. Stephen Wolfram.

David：真的，跟 Stephen Wolfram 共事。

Ben: Oh, shout out to friend of the show, Stephen.

Ben：哦，向我们节目的朋友 Stephen 致敬。

David: I know. Developers of Mathematica, that Wolfram Alpha. I guess eventually another search engine. So yes, Sergey, every bit Larry’s intellectual equal, every bit his sparring partner. Maybe a little more zany, too. More of a love for rollerblading than Larry, let’s put it that way.

David：没错，就是开发了 Mathematica 和 Wolfram Alpha 的那位。我猜以后也算是做了另一种搜索引擎。总之，谢尔盖在智力上完全不逊于拉里，是他不折不扣的对手兼伙伴。或许他更古怪一点，也更迷恋滑旱冰。

Ben: Frankly, it pencils now that you’re starting to get the picture of these two over time. In the far future closer to today, Sergey is the one doing stuff like Google Glass and skydiving videos. The zany parts of Google are Sergey’s DNA, and the really honed products, products that make the business work are a little bit more Larry’s DNA. But to be honest, there’s incredible overlap everywhere between the two of them.

Ben：说实话，随着时间推移，你会越来越看出两人的特点。后来靠近今天这段时光，像 Google Glass、跳伞直播这种脑洞大开的项目大多出自谢尔盖；而那些真正打磨得精益求精、支撑谷歌商业模式的产品则多少带着拉里的基因。但坦白讲，两人之间的互补和重叠无处不在。

David: Yeah. Okay, so fall of 1995, Larry arrives at Stanford. Sergey’s already there. Terry Winograd is his PhD advisor. Larry and Sergey are already building this great friendship.

David：是的。好了，1995 年秋天，拉里来到斯坦福，谢尔盖已在那儿。Terry Winograd 是拉里的博士导师。此时拉里和谢尔盖的友谊已经迅速升温。

Larry, that academic year, presents a dissertation topic to Terry, to his advisor, in collaboration with Sergey. The idea they have is this worldwide web thing seems to be becoming a thing. Here, where 1995, where a year after Netscape was started a couple of years after Mosaic.

在那个学年里，拉里与谢尔盖合作，向导师 Terry 提交了一个论文选题：这个叫万维网的东西似乎正逐渐成形。当时是 1995 年，距 Netscape 创立仅一年，距 Mosaic 诞生也不过两三年。

Ben: I have a stat for you on this era on the Internet.

Ben：我手上有一条关于那段互联网时代的统计数据。

David: Ooh, yeah. Lay it on me.

David：哦，说来听听。

Ben: This is from John Battelle’s book, The Search, which is excellent. “From 1993 to 1996, the web grew from 130 sites to more than 600,000.” If you compute that rate of growth over that four year period, it a 723% growth year over year for four years. That is exponential.

Ben：这数据来自 John Battelle 的名著《The Search》：“1993 年到 1996 年间，网站数量从 130 个激增到超过 60 万个。” 如果你计算那四年的增长率，相当于连续四年每年增长 723%。这是真正的指数级增长。

David: This is the version of the Jeff Bezos realization where it’s like, I got to leave Dijon and I got to build Amazon. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

David：这就像杰夫·贝索斯的顿悟版本——“我得离开 D.E. Shaw，去创办亚马逊。” 从未有过类似的事情发生。

Ben: The Internet is a phenomenon like no other, and it keeps going. It’s amazing for something to grow 700% year over year at all, but it happens. But for that to keep happening year over year over year for half a decade, that is worth quitting your job, dropping everything, changing your whole life.

Ben：互联网是一种前所未有的现象，而且还在不断发展。任何事物要想年增 700% 已经令人震惊，但互联网做到了。而且这种增速连续几年持续了近半个十年，这足以让人辞掉工作，放下一切，彻底改变人生轨迹。

David: And just a couple of years before, two other PhD students at Stanford had started this thing called Yahoo. I think perhaps inspired by what Yahoo was doing, Larry proposes that they’re going to work on this idea of a system that will allow people to make annotations and notes directly on websites instead of in a centralized directory like Yahoo. Because Yahoo was human hand–curated commentary, a directory of websites. The idea is like, oh, this could be a decentralized annotation system where anybody can say what’s interesting about a website.

David：就在几年前，斯坦福的另外两名博士生创办了名为 Yahoo 的网站。我想受到 Yahoo 的启发，拉里提出，他们要研究一个系统，让人们能直接在网站上做批注和笔记，而不是像 Yahoo 那样集中式目录式地呈现。Yahoo 由人工编辑网站目录和点评，而他们的设想是，一个去中心化的注释系统，让任何人都可以指出某网站的亮点所在。

Ben: It’s funny. I thought I knew the whole history of Google. I somehow missed this.

Ben：真有意思。我本以为自己了解谷歌的全部历史，没想到竟漏掉了这一段。

David: Terry, Larry’s advisor, is like, okay, I like the problem space, shall we say, of the web for your dissertation here, Larry. But why don’t you go refine this idea a little more and come back to me?

David：拉里的导师 Terry 说：“好吧，拉里，我喜欢你论文里所选的‘网络’这个问题域。但你不如再把这个想法打磨得更完善些，然后再来找我。”

Larry goes off, and of course he’s collaborating with Sergey on this. As they think about it, they realize that actually there’s a fundamental flaw in what they were planning for the sanitation system. For a big site, like (say) the New York Times or something, it’s just going to get overrun with hundreds, thousands, millions of users commenting. You need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, of the comments. You need to be able to have the good ones rise to the top. You need a way to rank them, you might say.

拉里离开去思考，并且当然与谢尔盖一起合作。当他们深入思考后，他们意识到在他们设想的“注释系统”里存在一个根本缺陷。对于一个像《纽约时报》那样的大型网站，评论会被成百上千甚至上百万的用户淹没。你需要一种办法去“去芜存菁”，让优质评论脱颖而出；换句话说，你需要一种对评论进行排序的方法。

Larry has a quote here. “It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web, build a system so that after you’d viewed a page, you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate a big site like Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments that we should classify as authoritative.” Hence PageRank.

拉里在这里说道：“我们当初并不是打算去做一个搜索引擎。我们做的是一个用来处理网页注释的排序系统。我们想给网络加上注释，构建一个系统，让人在浏览完页面后，点击就能看到其他人对它的精彩评论。但像雅虎那样的大站该由谁来注释？我们必须弄清楚用户应当看到哪些注释，也就是说要找出哪些站点的评论应被视为‘权威’。”于是便有了 PageRank。

Ben: Ah, yes. We should say page is ironic that the things that were being ranked were web pages, because the actual page and PageRank is named for Larry Page, not for the pages they would rank.

Ben：啊，对了。我们得说明一下，这里可能会产生一个巧合：被排序的对象是网页（pages），但 PageRank 中的 “Page” 其实源自拉里·佩奇（Larry Page）的姓氏，而不是要排序的那些页面。

David: Exactly. Larry goes back to Terry and he is like, okay, this ranking idea, this seems like a really interesting computer science problem. The annotation thing seems messy. Why don’t you just focus on rankings?

David：没错。拉里回去找 Terry，说：“好吧，这个排序的想法看起来是个非常有趣的计算机科学问题。注释这块太杂乱，不如我们只专注于排序？”

So Larry goes back and ultimately has the breakthrough leap. Oh, we should apply rankings to web pages themselves. Larry says, “Wow. The big problem here is not annotation. We should use it not for ranking annotations but for ranking searches.”

于是拉里回去后最终有了突破性飞跃：我们应该把排序应用到网页本身。拉里说：“哇，真正的大问题并不是注释；我们应当用它来给搜索结果排序，而不是给注释排序。”

Ben: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Ben：叮叮叮叮叮。（正中要害）

David: And thus, at least the germ of the idea for PageRank as we all know it today, is born.

David：就这样，至少是今日我们熟知的 PageRank 的雏形诞生了。

Ben: Essentially, just the mechanics of what the idea is, is try to rank websites based on how authoritative they are, based on how credible they are. This is something that has been done somewhere before the web very close to home for all these Stanford folks—Academia.

Ben：从机制上讲，这个思想就是根据网站的权威性和可信度来给它们排序。这在网络出现之前就有人做过，离这些斯坦福人很近的一个地方——学术界。

David: Of course, yes.

David：当然，没错。

Ben: How important is a research paper? Well, that depends how many other people cited the research paper.

Ben：一篇研究论文的重要性有多大？这取决于有多少其他人引用了这篇论文。

David: And in particular, not just how many raw number of other papers cite a research paper.

David：更具体地讲，不仅仅是看引用它的论文数量。

Ben: How many important papers cite your research paper.

Ben：而是要看有多少“重要论文”引用了你的研究论文。

David: If you’re in an important journal, what did those papers say? And this becomes the inspiration for how they’re going to do the ranking of webpages.

David：如果你的论文发表在重要期刊上，那些引用文献说了什么？这便成了他们为网页排名汲取的灵感。

Ben: This was actually a research field before the web, the study of academic citations. There’s already a body of work around how to do this well.

Ben：在网络出现之前，“学术引用分析”已经是一门研究领域；关于如何做好这件事，早已有成体系的研究成果。

David: Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that, actually. It makes sense.

David：哦，有趣。我之前真不知道这一点，但听起来很合理。

Ben: It’s like how Hollywood loves making movies about Hollywood. Academia loves doing papers about papers. There are some examples to look at of how might one use references or citations to weight importance.

Ben：就像好莱坞热衷于拍摄关于好莱坞的电影一样，学术界也喜欢写“关于论文的论文”。关于如何利用引用来衡量重要性，已经有不少案例可供参考。

David: So we’re almost all the way there to the huge leap that would become PageRank, then BackRub, and ultimately Google, but there’s still one missing piece. They’ve got the theory of how to do this, but what’s a citation on the web? Well, they realize it’s a link. A hyperlink is the exact same model as an academic citation.

David：因此，我们距离后来成为 PageRank、BackRub 乃至最终谷歌的巨大飞跃已经只差一步。他们已有完整的理论框架，但“在网络上什么算是引用？”这一点尚待解决。后来他们意识到——那就是链接。一个超链接与学术引用的模式完全相同。

Not only is it the same as a citation, it’s even better because there’s this metadata embedded within the link, which is the anchor text. Anytime you click a link, anybody who’s creating a link can make anchor text for it. Write whatever they want, then just today, Cmd+K on your keyboard, and then you can make that text into a link.

链接不仅等同于引用，甚至更好，因为链接中还嵌入了元数据——锚文本。任何人插入链接时，都可以为其添加锚文本，写下他们想写的词句，然后用快捷键（如今是 Cmd+K）把那段文字变成链接。

Well, that’s pretty easy to identify as metadata on an HTML page. You get not only a citation of the link, but a few words of what the author of that link thought about it.

而在 HTML 页面上，识别这种元数据非常容易。这样你不仅得到了一条“引用”，还获得了创建该链接的人对其看法的简短描述。

Ben: When someone is linking to you, they often do a better job of describing your website than you do on the page yourself. Anybody that’s just looking at your website to try to figure out what’s this about, the actual words on your website tend not to do as good a job as everyone who links to you in aggregate what words did they use to describe your website.

Ben：当别人给你的网站做链接时，他们往往比你自己在页面上描述得更到位。任何试图了解你网站内容的人，如果只看你自己写的文案，效果通常不如观察所有指向你的网站的那些人——他们用哪些词汇来概括你的网站——所呈现的整体描述。

This whole thing is a genius idea, and we’re going to talk about all the work that they had to do to implement it. It basically works right away. The notion of, hey, what is the output if we try to create a system that ranks all websites for authoritativeness, based on how many other reputable websites are linking to it, and then later on we can use the anchor text. But right now, just this ranking system. It spits out a list that’s sorted exactly as you would hope. It is the most authoritative websites first, and all the crap all the way at the bottom.

整个思路都堪称天才，我们稍后会讨论他们为实现它做了多少工作。它几乎一上手就奏效：构建一个系统，按有多少可靠网站链接到某站点来为全网站点排权威度，之后还可以再利用锚文本；但现阶段只用这套排名机制，它就能输出一份结果列表，排序恰如你所期待——最具权威的网站排在前面，杂七杂八的排到最后。

David: Yup. Terry’s like, yeah, do this for your dissertation. Great. Let’s do this project.

David：没错。Terry 说，好，就把这个当你的博士论文题目吧。太好了，我们就做这个项目。

Ben: Reputation on the web, that’s going to be valuable.

Ben：网络上的“信誉度”，这将极具价值。

David: There’s one more thing to making this brilliant PageRank idea work, which is a little problem, which is that the way the web is architected, any given webpage only shows outgoing links. There’s no way to query a page and say, oh, who links to me? You can only query a page and say, who do you link to?

David：要让这个绝妙的 PageRank 想法真正落地，还得解决一个小麻烦：按网络架构的固有方式，任何网页只显示“指向外部”的链接，你无法向页面查询“谁链接到我”，只能查询“我链接到谁”。

Ben: It’s easy for me to answer the question who’s in my phone book in my phone today? It’s hard for me to answer the question, whose phone books am I in?

Ben：就像我很容易回答“今天我的电话簿里有哪些联系人？”，却很难回答“有哪些人的电话簿里有我？”一样。

David: Exactly. The only way you could figure that out is if you somehow went and got a copy of everybody’s phone book, then could backtrace all the links. Well, that’s what they do. Google could not have been built at any other time in history because—

David：正是如此。唯一的办法就是设法拿到所有人的电话簿副本，然后反向追溯所有链接。他们就真这么干了。谷歌之所以诞生在那个时间点，也正因为——

Ben: The web was actually small enough that you could go suck it all up then.

Ben：当时的网络规模还小到可以全部爬下来、整体抓取。

David: Exactly. It was small enough that as a research project, it was not totally insane.

David：没错，对于一个研究项目来说，规模小到还不算完全疯狂。

Ben: Pretty insane.

Ben：也已经够疯狂了。

David: It’s just a little bit insane. It’s still pretty insane to say, oh, I’m going to go crawl the entire internet, make a copy of every webpage out there, store it in something (which we’ll get to), and then trace back all the links.

David：只是“稍微疯狂”一点而已。要知道，宣布要爬遍整个互联网，复制每个网页，存进某个系统（我们稍后会聊到），再反向解析全部链接，本身仍然相当疯狂。

Ben: And then reverse compute all the links to answer that one seemingly simple question of what webpage is linked to me.

Ben：然后再把所有链接都反向计算一遍，只为回答那个看似简单的问题：有哪些网页在链接我。

David: If you had tried to undertake this as a brand new project, even just a year or a couple of years later, it would’ve been impossible because the web would’ve already gotten so big that to just start and create an index copy like this, a full copy…

David：如果晚一年、甚至晚几个月才开始做这件事，几乎就办不到了，因为网络规模会迅速膨胀到你根本无法再从零开始做这样一份完整索引副本……

Ben: Even one year later would’ve been tens of millions of dollars and within a couple of years would’ve been hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ben：即便只晚一年，也得花上数千万美元；再过两三年，就要数亿美元了。

David: Prohibitively expensive.

David：成本高得令人望而却步。

Ben: So we’re in what, 96–97 here?

Ben：所以现在是 1996–1997 年左右，对吧？

David: Yup. We’re in 96, the back half of that first academic year of Larry at Stanford. With Terry’s encouraging, Larry and Sergey go forth to undertake this ambitious project. They set up a page on the Stanford internet. They decide that they’re going to call the project BackRub since it uses back links for ranking webpages.

David：没错。时间是 1996 年，也就是拉里在斯坦福的第一个学年的后半段。在 Terry 的鼓励下，拉里和谢尔盖开始着手这个雄心勃勃的项目。他们在斯坦福校园网上创建了一个页面，并决定将项目命名为 BackRub，因为它利用反向链接来给网页排名。

They spin up backrub.stanford.edu, and Larry writes the first implementation of PageRank and the crawler to go do this. He writes it in Java, it’s super buggy, and basically doesn’t work. They ask one of their friends there at Stanford, a guy named Scott Hassan to help them. Scott’s a better coder than Larry Sergey is. He codes it up in Python and it actually works.

他们上线了 backrub.stanford.edu，拉里用 Java 写出了 PageRank 的初版实现和相应的爬虫，但漏洞百出，基本跑不动。他们于是找来在斯坦福的一位朋友 Scott Hassan 帮忙。Scott 的编码水平比拉里和谢尔盖都高，他用 Python 重写后，系统终于跑通了。

Now Scott, not an employee of Google. Never would become an employee of Google because it’s not a company yet. It’s a research project.

此时的 Scott 并不是 Google 员工，也从未成为过 Google 员工，因为 Google 还不存在——这只是一个研究项目。

Ben: And they hadn’t even come up with the name Google. Nothing about this. It’s not a search engine.

Ben：他们甚至还没想出 “Google” 这个名字，什么都没有。这还不是一个搜索引擎。

David: Exactly. If you go to that project homepage, you can find past versions of this on the Internet or images. I think there’s even a recreation of it out there.

David：没错。如果你访问当时的项目主页，你还能在互联网上找到旧版本的截图，甚至有人复刻过这个页面。

Ben: With the really weird black and white picture of a BackRub with the red text over it.

Ben：就是那个画面里有一张奇怪的黑白“按摩背部”照片，上面盖着红色文字的页面。

David: I think that picture actually was on backrub.stanford.edu. It looks like somebody’s back.

David：那张照片确实出现在 backrub.stanford.edu，看上去就像是某人的背部。

Ben: They certainly didn’t search Google images for it. I know that.

Ben：他们肯定没用 Google 图片去搜索那张图，我敢肯定。

David: Exactly. The text on the page says, “BackRub is a ‘web crawler,’ which is designed to traverse the web. Currently, we are developing techniques to improve web search engines.” So yeah, Ben. They’re not thinking of BackRub as a search engine yet. They’re thinking of BackRub as just an implementation of a crawler and the PageRank algorithm.

David：没错。页面上写着：“BackRub 是一种‘网页爬虫’，旨在遍历整个网络。目前我们正在开发改进网页搜索引擎的技术。”所以，Ben，他们当时并未把 BackRub 当成搜索引擎，而是把它看作爬虫与 PageRank 算法的实现。

Ben: That’s interesting. But they have the insight that this method of ranking, if it turns out to be better, could contribute to better search engines.

Ben：这很有意思。不过他们有个洞见：如果这种排名方法更出色，将来可以用来提升搜索引擎。

David: Yup. Again, even though Larry really wants to start a company, he’s thinking he’s going to get his PhD and they go forth here.

David：是的。尽管拉里很想创业，但他仍打算先拿到博士学位，所以项目就这样继续下去。

Ben: Kind of like Mark Zuckerberg got years into Facebook before realizing, oh, this is my company.

Ben：就像马克·扎克伯格经营 Facebook 几年后才意识到：“哦，这是我的公司。”一样。

David: So Larry and Sergey are building BackRub here, and I mentioned Scott Hassan, their friend who helps code it up in Python, doesn’t end up joining Google. Well, what happened to Scott? Scott leaves while all this is going on and starts a company. Because it’s 1996–1997. You’re here in Silicon Valley. The bubble is inflating. What do you do? You go start a company.

David：拉里和谢尔盖在忙着做 BackRub。我之前提到过，帮助他们用 Python 编码的朋友 Scott Hassan 最终并未加入 Google。那 Scott 后来干嘛去了？当时是 1996–1997 年，硅谷泡沫正在膨胀，所以他离开后自己创业去了。

Ben: It’s your obligation to go, take, and smash this piñata.

Ben：这是时代赋予你的义务——去敲破这只“彩球”，抢到一切机会。

David: So Scott leaves, starts a company called eGroups. That company a couple of years later, ends up getting acquired by Yahoo, becomes Yahoo Groups for about \$400 million. Do you know who co-founded eGroups with Scott?

David：于是 Scott 创办了一家公司叫 eGroups。几年后，该公司被雅虎以约 4 亿美元收购，变成了 Yahoo Groups。你知道 eGroups 另一位联合创始人是谁吗？

Ben: Ugh, man, you’re stumping me today. No.

Ben：唉，今天你可真难倒我了。我不知道。

David: Larry’s older brother Carl Page.

David：拉里的哥哥叫卡尔·佩奇。

Ben: Oh, that’s this company?

Ben：哦，原来是这家公司？

David: Yes.

David：没错。

Ben: Wow.

Ben：哇。

David: So here we are. We’ve got Larry and Sergey doing this research project to improve search engines. Meanwhile, their buddy who helped code that and Larry’s older brother just want to start a company and then they raised money. Sequoia and Mike Moritz would end up funding eGroups.

David：事情就是这样。拉里和谢尔盖在做改进搜索引擎的科研项目，与此同时，帮他们编码的那位朋友和拉里的哥哥只想创办一家公司，随后他们真的融资成功。最终是红杉资本的迈克·莫里茨投资了 eGroups。

Ben: And then they sell it for \$400 million to the leading web company at the time. That seems like a good idea.

Ben：之后他们把公司以 4 亿美元卖给了当时最领先的互联网公司。这看起来是个不错的决定。

David: Larry and Sergey start thinking, ooh, wait. Maybe we should do something commercial around this. This seems like it would have value.

David：拉里和谢尔盖开始想：哦，等等，也许我们也该把自己的成果商业化。这东西看起来很有价值。

That leads them in the spring of 1997, before school is out, to start shopping this BackRub technology around to the other existing search engines at the time. They’re not yet thinking that this could be a company. They’re thinking, we’re going to sell this technology to another search engine. They’re going to pay us a lot of money for it. We’ll go come help implement it, and then we’ll go back and finish our PhDs.

于是，在 1997 年春天学期结束前，他们开始把 BackRub 技术兜售给当时已有的其他搜索引擎。他们还没想到要成立公司，只想着把技术卖掉，对方付给他们一大笔钱；他们再去帮忙落地，之后回斯坦福把博士念完。

Ben: Because they effectively have it working at this point, even though it’s not hardened. They have a crawler that has run on a small number of websites. They have a very modest index that has been created. It’s not all efficient and everything, but they have the proof of, hey look, this ranking is actually a good ranking of how authoritative these websites are.

Ben：因为此时他们的系统基本能跑起来，虽然还没完全固化。他们有个爬虫已在少量网站上运行，生成了一个很小的索引。效率不高，功能也不完善，但足以证明：看，这个排名确实很好地反映了这些网站的权威性。

David: But other than some demo proof of concepts, they haven’t yet built the consumer version of, hey, you can go query this thing and anybody can use it.

David：不过除了演示性质的原型外，他们尚未做出面向公众的版本，也就是那种任何人都能来查询的系统。

So they’re shopping it around that spring, that summer. They get a bunch of meetings. They meet with Infoseek, Lycos, all the existing search engines.

于是那个春夏之交，他们四处兜售技术，安排了不少会议，见了 Infoseek、Lycos 等当时已有的各家搜索引擎。

Ben: And we should say, there was a large list of other search engines, portals, internet properties.

Ben：得说明一下，彼时搜索引擎、门户网站、互联网产品多如牛毛。

David: Search engine–like things.

David：各种类似搜索引擎的东西。

Ben: That existed, and had traffic. Archie, Gopher, Alta Vista, HotBot, Inktomi, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek.

Ben：它们都已有流量：Archie、Gopher、AltaVista、HotBot、Inktomi、Lycos、Yahoo、Excite、Infoseek。

David: The list goes on and on and on, yes. The closest they get that spring and summer is with Excite. This story’s amazing.

David：名单可以列个没完没了。那个春夏，他们谈得最接近成交的是 Excite。这个故事相当精彩。

Supposedly—this is according to In the Plex, Steven Levy’s book, a great book that we used as a source for the episode—they end up getting a meeting with Vinod Khosla, a legendary founder of Sun Microsystems. By this point in time, he’s one of the top VCs in the valley. He’s at Kleiner Perkins alongside John Doer. The two of them are running the firm, and Vinod is on the board of Excite.

据斯蒂文·利维在《In the Plex》一书中的记载（我们本期节目的资料来源之一），他们最终见到了 Sun Microsystems 传奇创始人维诺德·科斯拉。当时他已是硅谷顶级风投之一，与约翰·杜尔共同执掌凯鹏华盈，同时担任 Excite 的董事。

Somehow, Larry and Sergey—I think they bring Scott along—get a meeting with Vinod and they hammer out a deal that Excite is going to license this BackRub search technology from the two of them for about a million dollars. Part of that’s in cash, part of that’s in Excite stock. Larry and Sergey are going to come work at Excite that summer, implement BackRub for their search—basically make Excite into Google—then they’re going to leave and they’re going to go back to Stanford in the fall.

拉里和谢尔盖（好像还带着 Scott）设法见到了维诺德，并敲定一笔交易：Excite 以约 100 万美元（部分现金、部分 Excite 股票）的代价许可使用 BackRub 技术。那个夏天，拉里和谢尔盖将去 Excite 工作，把 BackRub 集成进他们的搜索——基本上把 Excite 变成 Google——然后秋天回斯坦福继续读博。

They get so far that they run a side-by-side test of Excite’s search results, the original algorithm and then the BackRub algorithm. The legend goes that they’re demoing this test to Excite’s CEO as a final step to finalizing this deal.

事情进展到他们做了并排测试：一边是 Excite 原有算法的搜索结果，一边是 BackRub 算法。传说中，他们向 Excite CEO 演示这个测试，作为敲定交易的最后一步。

The results are so relevant with BackRub. You get exactly what you search for, exactly what you want. It’s right there. You click, you go to it. And the usual Excite search is bad. You have to click around, you go forward, you come back, you spend a lot of time on the site.

BackRub 的结果极其精准：你搜什么就得到什么，点击即可直达。而 Excite 原有的搜索体验则很糟，你得点来点去、前进后退，在站内耗费大量时间。

The CEO is like, why on earth would we move to your algorithm? I want people to stay on my site. I make money when people stay on my site. I don’t want them to leave my site. You guys are crazy. Get out of here. I’m killing the whole deal.

Excite 的 CEO 当场表示：我们为什么要换你们的算法？我希望用户留在我的网站——用户留得越久，我赚得越多。我不想让他们离开。你们疯了吗？出去吧，这交易不做了。

Ben: It is amazing that as early as 1996–1997 this time period, this very important conflict of interests is teased out. This is basically why Google beat Yahoo.

Ben：令人惊讶的是，早在 1996–1997 年间，这个非常重要的利益冲突就被揭示出来了。这基本就是谷歌击败雅虎的原因。

There’s a lot more to it, but the portals all had this mentality of we want to build more and more and keep people on our site, in our ecosystem, continue to look at our banner ads.

事情远不止于此，所有门户网站都抱着一种心态：我们要不断扩充内容，把用户留在我们的网站、我们的生态里，继续浏览我们的横幅广告。

Google from this point, basically forever was how quickly can we deliver someone something relevant so they can leave Google and I’ve had a good experience finding what they really wanted?

而从那时起，谷歌的理念基本一直是：我们怎样才能更快地把最相关的信息提供给用户，让他们离开谷歌并且对找到真正想要的内容感到满意？

David: Now all this is laughable in hindsight, but made total sense at the time because what was the business paradigm for all these sites? What was the model? It was banner ads, it was CPM, cost per thousand views. You wanted page views and impressions on your site. Here what BackRub is doing is they’re going to kneecap your page views.

David：现在回头看这些都很可笑，但在当时却完全可以理解，因为那些网站的商业范式是什么？商业模式是什么？就是横幅广告、就是 CPM（每千次展示成本）。你需要网站的页面浏览量和展示量。而 BackRub 的做法正好会削弱你的网站流量。

Ben: They’re going to dramatically reduce the number of page views and allocate them to other properties on the web so they can leave your property.

Ben：它们会大幅减少你的页面浏览量，把流量分配到网络上的其他网站，让用户离开你的网站。

David: This deal was never going to happen with Excite or anybody else because it broke the business model.

David：这笔交易不可能在 Excite 或其他任何公司达成，因为它破坏了他们的商业模式。

Ben: It was not strategic for them. It was a conflict of interest to implement this type of better ranking, better search, faster technology. Back to the lab, right? No deal.

Ben：这对他们来说毫无战略意义。要实现这种更好排序、更好搜索、更快的技术，利益上存在冲突。回实验室吧，对吧？交易告吹。

David: Exactly. That fall in 1997, Larry and Sergey go back to school. All these get-rich-quick deals have fallen apart. Nobody wants BackRub. Larry’s just like, well F it. This is how I believe search should work. We’re going to build this thing ourselves here at Stanford.

David：没错。1997 年秋天，拉里和谢尔盖回到学校。这些一夜暴富的交易全部泡汤，没有人要 BackRub。拉里心想，管它呢，我认为搜索应该这样运作。我们就在斯坦福自己把它做出来。

Quote from him, “We couldn’t get anyone interested in buying BackRub. We did get offers, but they weren’t for much money. So we said whatever. We went back to Stanford to work on it some more. These companies weren’t going to focus on search. They were becoming portals. IE they wanted eyeballs, page views. They didn’t understand search and they weren’t technology people.”

他后来回忆道：“没有人对收购 BackRub 感兴趣。虽然有人报价，但都不高。于是我们想算了，回斯坦福继续研究。这些公司不会专注于搜索，他们都在变成门户网站——也就是要眼球、要页面浏览量。他们不懂搜索，也不是技术驱动的公司。”

Ben: And when he says we talked to others, they tried to sell PageRank to Yahoo for \$1 million and were rejected. There are going to be chapters of this story that you can mark by the different times that Yahoo discussed buying Google and didn’t. But this is the very first. They showed the tech to Infoseek, also didn’t happen. Infoseek was bought by Disney and later shut down. They showed the tech to Lycos. They were shopping it all around town.

Ben：当他说“我们也找过别人”时，他们曾试图以 100 万美元把 PageRank 卖给雅虎，但被拒绝了。后面这个故事会出现多个章节——雅虎多次讨论收购谷歌却没有成行，这是第一次。他们把技术演示给 Infoseek，也没成功。Infoseek 被迪士尼收购后又关闭。他们还演示给 Lycos，到处兜售这项技术。

David: They get back to campus. They’re like, all right. We’re going to build a real search engine ourselves. First order of business, the name. BackRub, you probably not going to fly.

David：他们回到校园后决定：好吧，我们得自己打造一个真正的搜索引擎。第一件事是起个名字。BackRub 这名字恐怕不行。

Ben: Describes the technical underpinnings but doesn’t really describe the searching.

Ben：它描述了技术底层，却没真正体现搜索的意义。

David: They’re casting about trying to find the right name to encapsulate what they’re doing, this new good form of search. The story is that Larry’s dorm mate suggests the term Google.

David：他们四处琢磨，想找一个能概括他们正在做的新型优秀搜索方式的名字。故事说，拉里的室友提出了“Google”这个词。

Ben: Oh wait, do you know the name before this?

Ben：哦，等等，你知道在这之前的名字吗？

David: Oh no.

David：哦，不知道。

Ben: Do I know something you don’t? Oh this is great.

Ben：难道我知道你不知道的事？这太棒了。

David: Oh, go for it.

David：好，快说吧。

Ben: The name is Whatbox.

Ben：那个名字叫 Whatbox。

David: Whatbox?

David：Whatbox？

Ben: Whatbox. It rolls right off the tongue. It’s a box that you type stuff into. It’s a question.

Ben：对，Whatbox。读起来挺顺口的。就是一个你输入内容的框，一个问题的盒子。

David: Okay. I get it.

David：好吧，明白了。

Ben: But they decided that it sounded too close to a porn site, so they decided not to go with it.

Ben：但他们觉得这个名字听起来太像成人网站，于是决定不用了。

David: Well hey, I guess if Facebook can be a product name and a company, then yeah, maybe we could all be Whatboxing things.

David：嘿，要是 Facebook 都能既当产品名又当公司名，也许我们大家迟早都会去 “Whatbox” 一番呢。

Ben: We are all WhatsApping, so to be fair…

Ben：毕竟大家现在都在 “WhatsApp” 呀……

David: Yeah. It wasn’t that crazy.

David：对，其实也没那么离谱。

Ben: It wasn’t that crazy. But yes, Whatbox’s out. Next name, how did Google come about?

Ben：确实没那么离谱。但无论如何，Whatbox 被否了。接下来，Google 这个名字是怎么来的？

David: Larry’s dorm mate suggests that they might want to use the term Googol, which is the mathematical term for one followed by 100 zeros.

David：拉里的室友建议用 “Googol” 这个词——数学上表示 1 后面跟 100 个零的数字。

Ben: 10 to the 100th power.

Ben：也就是 10 的 100 次方。

David: The legend is that Larry loves the name, Sergey likes it. They go to register the domain name and Larry misspells it and thought that Googol was spelled G-O-O-G-L-E.

David：传说拉里非常喜欢这个名字，谢尔盖也觉得不错。他们去注册域名时，拉里把 Googol 拼错了，写成了 G-O-O-G-L-E。

Ben: Misspells, really? I thought googol.com was taken.

Ben：真的是拼错吗？我还以为 googol.com 已经被注册了呢。

David: Oh, maybe that’s it. Like anything here, there are a lot of legends floating around.

David：哦，也可能是这样。很多细节都有不同的传闻。

Ben: But the misspelling is actually great because you should spell it the way that other people are most likely to spell it.

Ben：不过这个“拼错”其实挺好，因为要用大多数人最可能的拼写方式。

David: Exactly. This is before you’ve got to Google, did you mean in the search box? Yes. Spelling was important.

David：没错。那时可还没有 “Did you mean …?” 的提示，拼写准确就很关键。

So Sergey designs the homepage and makes the first logo using the open source drawing program, GIMP. You ever used GIMP back in the day?

于是谢尔盖用开源绘图软件 GIMP 设计了首页并画出了第一版 logo。你那时候用过 GIMP 吗？

Ben: Oh, and you can tell it is drawn using GIMP. A lot of people probably can think of the earliest Google logo you’ve ever seen. Even the real nerds out there are like, oh yeah, I know about that one. That was really colorful before the drop shadow thing. There’s even one before that that’s completely illegible, and this is the one that we’re talking about. But it was rainbow-colored.

Ben：一看就知道是用 GIMP 画的。很多人可能记得最早的 Google logo；资深极客们会说：哦，我知道那版，特别彩色，还没阴影效果。在那之前还有一版几乎看不清的——我们说的就是那一版，彩虹配色。

David: Yes it was. We’ll link to it in the show notes and on social media. It’s fun to look at. But basically that homepage design of all the colorful logo in a search box, that was it then. That’s it today.

David：对，就是那样。我们会在节目笔记和社交媒体贴链接，大家可以去看看。实际上，当时首页就是彩色 logo 加搜索框，而今天也仍是如此。

Ben: 1997 onward.

Ben：从 1997 年开始到现在。

David: So that 97–98 academic year is when they’re building BackRub into Google. By spring, quarter of that year Google google.com is doing 10,000 queries a day. This has started to spread virally first on the Stanford campus, and then to other academic universities and communities out there get wind of what they’re doing. Then it starts spreading into Silicon Valley. It’s like bringing the Stanford network to its knees with all the traffic that is happening on google.com out of Stanford.

David：就在 1997–1998 这个学年，他们把 BackRub 打造成 Google。到当年春季学期，google.com 每天已处理一万次查询。先是在斯坦福校园内疯传，随后其他大学和学术社区也闻讯而来，再后来蔓延到整个硅谷。google.com 从斯坦福发出的流量之大，几乎把校园网拖垮。

Ben: So at one point, they actually did bring down the Stanford network. This is how fast it all happened. It’s all during this academic calendar where they’re taking BackRub, they’re working in a search box. There’s now a keyword that we’re ranking things for, not just arbitrarily ranking them. That keyword relies heavily on the anchor text descriptions.

Ben：有一次他们真的把斯坦福的网络搞崩了。事情发展就是这么快——在同一个学年里，他们把 BackRub 做成了带搜索框的系统；现在可以按关键词来排名，而非随意排序。关键词的相关性高度依赖锚文本描述。

There are these two early key innovations. There’s waiting results based on backlinks and there’s description from anchor text. And it really did just work.

早期的两大关键创新就是：根据反向链接来加权结果，以及利用锚文本来生成描述。事实证明，这套方法确实奏效。

The technical underpinnings are extremely difficult. They’re having to do things like steal computers from other research projects. Do you know about the loading dock stuff, David?

技术底层难度极高，他们甚至要从其他研究项目“借用”计算机。David，你知道装货码头那件事吗？

David: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

David：哦，当然知道。

Ben: There are these famous stories of other researchers that have ordered computers, but they actually aren’t going to start the project for a few months. Larry and Sergey would go grab them off the loading dock, spin them up, use them for Google just for a few months until they need to go and hand them over for the other research projects.

Ben：有些著名的轶事说，其他研究人员订购了电脑，却要几个月后才开工；拉里和谢尔盖就把这些机器从装货码头搬走，先拿来启动、运行 Google，用上几个月，等到原项目真的要用时再归还。

David, to your point, they bring down the Stanford network because there’s so much traffic. There’s so much demand for something that is just clearly a better way of ranking websites than what everybody else was doing.

David，你刚才说得对，他们的流量大到把斯坦福的网络都拖垮了。大家对这种显然比其他人排名网站方式更好的新方法的需求实在太旺盛。

Everyone else is basically just using keywords on pages and saying, well what pages exist out there with the word dog? And if they have a whole bunch of instances of dog, then that’s going to be the top of your results for dog, no matter how authoritative they are. Obviously, that’s a problem.

其他搜索引擎基本只是看网页上的关键词，比如查“dog”时，就找出所有包含大量“dog”一词的页面，不管它们是否权威，结果排在最前。显然，这方法有大问题。

This is just a better way to do search. And they’re really starting to sop up Stanford’s network bandwidth. At one point, they’re using about half the bandwidth of the entire university to be serving out google.com pages.

Google 的做法显然更优，所以迅速吞噬了斯坦福的网络带宽。曾有一段时间，google.com 的页面传输占去了全校近一半带宽。

David, to your point, it’s not a heavy website. It’s a white page with an image, a search box, and then when you go to the results page there are no images. if they’re consuming an incredible amount of bandwidth for something that’s so asset-light, people are using the crap out of this thing.

David，如你所说，这站点并不“重”：主页就是白底、一张图片、一个搜索框，结果页甚至没有图片。既然这么轻量还耗费巨量带宽，说明用户狂热地在用它。

David: Yup. Here we are, end of the 1998 academic year. It’s clear this is going to be a company, this has to be a company. Stanford’s about to tip over if it stays as a project anymore.

David：没错。转眼到 1998 学年末，显而易见它必须成为一家公司——再作为校园项目下去，斯坦福就要撑不住了。

Ben: Stanford has been very kind to say, we’re going to keep housing all the infrastructure for this thing, but at some point, this needs to be a company so that you can get it off of our network and fund it on your own.

Ben：斯坦福很慷慨地说，会暂时继续托管所有基础设施，但需要尽快把它公司化，搬离校园网络，自行融资运营。

David: And nobody should shed a tear for Stanford here because as part of the tech transfer to spin it out of the university, they end up getting 1% of the company or something like that. Stanford did very, very well for their large yes here.

David：不过也没人需要为斯坦福担心——技术转移出去时，学校获得了大约 1% 的公司股份。斯坦福这笔买卖做得相当划算。

So Larry and Sergey go to a professor in the CS department at Stanford named Dave Cheriton. Dave had started an ethernet company called Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim from Sun, while also staying as a professor at Stanford at the same time. He was a founder of Granite Systems and had stayed as a professor.

于是拉里和谢尔盖找到计算机系的教授 Dave Cheriton。他曾与 Sun 的 Andy Bechtolsheim 共同创办以太网公司 Granite Systems，同时仍在斯坦福任教。

Cisco had just acquired Granite for \$220 million. Larry and Sergey are like, oh, okay Dave, he is one of our professors. He knows how to do this stuff. He’s like, well why don’t you talk to Andy about how we could spin this out and make it into a company?

思科刚以 2.2 亿美元收购 Granite。拉里和谢尔盖意识到：Dave 是我们的教授，懂创业。Dave 建议道：那就跟 Andy 谈谈吧，看看如何把项目拆分出来做成公司。

Dave emails Andy that evening. Andy replies right away. He’s like, sure. I’m busy tomorrow, but how about we meet at your house at 8:00 AM in the morning? I’ll come by on my way to the office. Thus begins the story of Google’s legendary seed financing round and the crazy cast of characters involved in it. But before we tell that story…

当晚 Dave 给 Andy 发邮件，Andy 立刻回信：没问题，我明天很忙，但可以早上 8 点去你家见面，上班路上顺便过去。于是，Google 传奇种子轮融资的故事及其群星阵容就此拉开序幕。不过，在讲这个故事之前……

Ben: Now is a great time to talk about our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan Payments. Listeners, you’ve heard us talk about specific aspects over the last few episodes, like biometric payments, their developer platform, and their supply chain financing. But today we wanted to pop up a level and tell you about the Acquired and J.P. Morgan partnership itself.

Ben：现在正好聊聊我们的呈现合作伙伴——摩根大通支付。听众朋友们，过去几期我们讨论过他们的一些具体功能，比如生物识别支付、开发者平台、供应链融资。今天我们想升到更高层面，谈谈 Acquired 与摩根大通的整体合作关系。

David: Well first is the team. The folks there at J.P. Morgan are: (a) absolutely world class, and (b) really get Acquired and what makes this community special. Just look at the Chase Center show we did. They took our vision and said, what if we did all this times 10. And now, we’re about to go do it all over again at Radio City.

David：首先是他们的团队：摩根大通的人（a）绝对是世界级的，（b）非常理解 Acquired 及其社区的独特价值。看看我们在 Chase Center 的那场活动吧，他们把我们的想法放大十倍执行。现在，我们又要在无线电城重演一次。

Ben: And deeper than that, they’re just an insanely trusted brand. J.P. Morgan Payments is the world’s largest payment franchise. They power 18 of the top 20 corporations in the world, and most companies we’ve covered on the show. In fact, over 90% of the Fortune 500 companies do business with them.

Ben：更深层次地说，他们本身就是极受信赖的品牌。摩根大通支付是全球最大的支付网络，为全球前 20 强企业中的 18 家提供服务，也为节目中谈到的大多数公司提供支持。事实上，超过 90% 的《财富》500 强企业都与他们合作。

David: A couple of years ago, we were worried that oh, J.P. Morgan Payments might only be for big companies, but it’s not. We’ve seen startups that heard about them on Acquired become customers. And that’s our goal in picking partners, is to find the very best companies that create value for listeners and will scale with your success and be around forever. That is J.P. Morgan payments.

大卫：几年前，我们还担心摩根大通支付可能只面向大型企业，但事实并非如此。我们见过一些在《Acquired》中听说他们的初创公司后来成为了客户。我们选择合作伙伴的目标，就是找到那些能为听众创造价值、能随着你的成功一起扩张、并且能够长期存在的最佳公司。那就是摩根大通支付。

They literally do \$10 trillion in payment volume a day. Think about how insane that is. With J.P. Morgan processing over 50% of all US e-commerce transactions, their software and payment rails basically underpin our entire global financial system.

他们每天处理的支付量高达 10 万亿美元。想想这有多疯狂。摩根大通处理了美国超过 50% 的电子商务交易，他们的软件和支付网络基本撑起了整个全球金融体系。

Ben: Lastly, every single one of your companies needs payments. J.P. Morgan thinks about payments as a lever for growth, not just vanilla operational stuff. They’ve been investing heavily with products now for fraud prevention, FX, working capital and more. All of course built enterprise-grade, with developer tools, and APIs.

本：最后，你们的每一家企业都需要支付能力。摩根大通把支付视作增长杠杆，而不仅仅是日常运营功能。他们如今在防欺诈、外汇、营运资金等产品上投入巨大，全部达到企业级水准，并配备开发者工具和 API。

You can learn more at jpmorgan.com/acquired, which itself is a cool custom site they’ve built, that has details on the products we’ve been talking about all season, plus a little behind the scenes video of Acquired Live at Chase Center from last year. When you get in touch, just tell them that Ben and David sent you, or shoot us a message in Slack and we’ll get you connected with their team.

你可以访问 jpmorgan.com/acquired 了解更多信息，这是他们专门搭建的很酷网站，上面有我们整季节目提到的那些产品的详细信息，还有去年《Acquired》在 Chase Center 现场活动的幕后花絮视频。联系他们时，只需告诉他们是 Ben 和 David 让你来的，或者在 Slack 给我们发消息，我们会帮你与他们团队对接。

All right, David, the Google seed round.

好了，David，我们来说说 Google 的种子轮融资。

David: Here we go. So 8:00 AM the next morning, Larry and Sergey roused themselves out of bed over on the Stanford campus, head on over to downtown Palo Alto at Dave’s house. Andy drives up. He’s like, I’m in a hurry. Show me what you got.

大卫：故事开始了。第二天早上 8 点，拉里和谢尔盖在斯坦福校区起床，赶到帕洛阿尔托市中心的 Dave 家。安迪驱车赶来，说：“我很赶时间，把你们的东西给我看看。”

They demo Google for him. Andy loves it. He’s like, great, I’m in. \$100,000? Larry and Sergey are like, but we weren’t talking about raising money. We just wanted some advice to start a company. He’s like, great, I’ll go get the check from my car.

他们向他演示了 Google。安迪非常喜欢，说：“太棒了，我要投，10 万美元？”拉里和谢尔盖回答：“但我们没打算融资，我们只是想找些创业建议。”安迪说：“好，我去车里取支票。”

He writes a check to Larry and Sergey made out to Google Inc. for \$100,000, basically just throws it at them, hops in his car and takes off. Google Inc. does not exist yet. This is actually true. This actually happened. Andy’s like, you guys figure this out. That’s your problem, not mine. I’m good for the money.

他开出一张收款人为 Google Inc.、金额 10 万美元的支票，几乎是把支票扔给他们，然后跳上车离开。Google Inc. 此时还不存在。这是真的，确实发生过。安迪说：“你们自己搞定后面的事，那是你们的问题，不是我的，我的钱没问题。”

Ben: No investment documents, no valuation. Just, here’s \$100,000. I assume I will get something for my investment.

本：没有投资文件，没有估值。就给你 10 万美元。我假设我能得到一些回报。

David: Exactly, and this was the forcing function for Google Inc. to get founded.

大卫：没错，这正是促成 Google Inc. 成立的外部压力。

Ben: So Larry and Sergey need to be able to spin up an entity, have that own the intellectual property from Stanford, and set up a bank account for that entity such that they can deposit this check before it expires.

本：因此，拉里和谢尔盖需要成立一个实体，让它拥有斯坦福转出的知识产权，并为该实体开立银行账户，这样他们就能在支票过期前把钱存进去。

David: It takes a couple of months to get all this done, which, depending on who you ask, is either very good or very bad, because in the intervening months, Dave himself decides to throw in another \$100,000 to the funding here.

大卫：这一切花了几个月才完成，这取决于你问谁，也许是好事也许是坏事，因为这期间 Dave 又决定再投 10 万美元。

Larry and Sergey meet a former Netscape guy named Ram Shriram who started advising them on starting this company, spinning things out.

拉里和谢尔盖认识了一位前 Netscape 员工 Ram Shriram，他开始为他们提供创业、剥离项目的建议。

Ben: And longtime Acquired listeners will recognize this name from our Amazon episode.

本：长期收听《Acquired》的听众对这个名字应该不陌生——我们在亚马逊那期节目提到过他。

David: Oh yes. Ram had left Netscape and joined a startup called Junglee that amazon.com then acquired. So Ram had a little bit of liquidity. He throws in \$250,000 into the round and he is like, hey, do you guys want to meet Jeff Bezos?

大卫：没错。Ram 离开 Netscape 加入了一家名为 Junglee 的初创公司，之后 amazon.com 收购了该公司。Ram 手头有些现金，他向这一轮投了 25 万美元，然后说：“嘿，你们想见见杰夫·贝索斯吗？”

Ben: Who at this point, it’s interesting. You think about Amazon and Google as equally old companies. Jeff is the elder statesman of the Internet. His company was started in 94. This is 98. Amazon just went public the year before.

本：此时很有意思，你会觉得亚马逊和 Google 是同龄公司，但杰夫是互联网界的元老。他的公司创立于 1994 年，现在是 1998 年，亚马逊前一年刚上市。

It’s crazy that at this point in time, it was little Larry and Sergey’s grad students’ meeting public CEO Jeff Bezos. It’s almost like when your 6-month-old baby is hanging out with a 14-month-old. You’re like, oh my God, they’re so different, but they’re going to be classmates in a couple of years. They’re basically the same age.

不可思议的是，当时还是小小研究生的拉里和谢尔盖见到了上市公司 CEO 杰夫·贝索斯。这就像 6 个月大的婴儿和 14 个月大的婴儿在一起玩，你会觉得他们差距好大，但几年后他们会变成同班同学，实际上年龄差不多。

David: Exactly. Ram arranges a meeting. The next time that Jeff is in Silicon Valley, they all meet at Ram’s house. Similar to Andy Bechtolsheim, Jeff’s like, great. Ram, what are you in for, \$250,000? I’m in for \$252,000.

大卫：没错。Ram 安排了会面。下次杰夫来硅谷，他们在 Ram 家见面。和安迪·贝托利希姆的情景类似，杰夫说：“太棒了。Ram，你投了 25 万？那我就投 25 万 2 千。”

All in, they end up raising \$1 million, at a \$10 million post money valuation. And yes, Jeff Bezos does a quarter of Google’s seed round.

最终，他们共筹集到 100 万美元，融资后估值 1,000 万美元。没错，杰夫·贝索斯认购了 Google 种子轮的四分之一。

Ben: It’s so crazy. We knew about this in the past because we talked about it on the Amazon episode, but whenever I heard someone reference Jeff Bezos was an angel investor in Google, I always thought, well yeah, but you look at any of these startup cap tables and there are 50 founder friends in addition to the main VC. That’s not surprising at all. But Jeff is a quarter of the money in the seed round. One of four investors. Is that right?

本：这太疯狂了。我们之前在亚马逊那期节目里谈到过，但每当听到别人说杰夫·贝索斯是谷歌的天使投资人时，我总想：是啊，可大多数初创公司的股权表上除了主力 VC 还有五十个创始人朋友，这并不稀奇。可杰夫却占了种子轮资金的四分之一，是四位投资者之一，对吧？

David: That’s right. You have Andy, Dave, Ram, and Jeff. Jeff has never said whether he sold any of his Google shares along the way, but by my math, if he didn’t, that stake is worth about \$20 billion today.

大卫：没错。投资人是安迪、戴夫、拉姆和杰夫。杰夫从未透露自己是否在途中卖过谷歌股票，但按我的计算，如果他一直没卖，现在这笔股份大约价值 200 亿美元。

Ben: And even if he did sell at IPO, he turned that \$250,000 into something like \$200 million at IPO.

本：即使他在上市时就卖掉了，那 25 万美元在 IPO 时也变成了大约 2 亿美元。

David: Right. Nice returns. Amazon stock was probably in the dumpster when Google went public, so could have used the money.

大卫：没错，回报可观。谷歌上市时亚马逊股价可能惨不忍睹，所以这笔钱正好派上用场。

Anyway, Google is now an official company. They’ve got a million dollars in cash from their crazy seed round.

总之，谷歌如今正式成了一家公司，并从那疯狂的种子轮里拿到了 100 万美元现金。

Ben: It seems like they might burn through that fast because of their business model of trying to store the entire internet on their servers. But you got a million dollars, you’re no longer a Stanford project, you’re spun out, you got investors. What’s next?

本：他们的商业模式是想把整个互联网都存进自家服务器，看起来这笔钱可能很快烧光。但好歹你有了 100 万美元，不再是斯坦福项目，已经剥离出去，还有投资人。下一步呢？

David: Well, first office space. Famously, they go find space in a Menlo Park garage, a house owned by one Susan Wojcicki, who was a manager at Intel, and soon would become herself an early Google employee, and then—

大卫：首先是办公地点。众所周知，他们在门洛帕克租了一间车库，房主是苏珊·沃西基，当时是英特尔的经理，不久就成了谷歌早期员工，然后——

Ben: Eventually CEO of YouTube.

本：最终成为 YouTube 的 CEO。

David: Exactly.

大卫：没错。

Ben: But besides office space, it’s time to put your product out into the world. I think it’s worth drilling in here, what was the state of search in 1998 when Google becomes a company?

本：但除了办公空间，是时候把产品推向世界了。我觉得有必要深入聊聊 1998 年谷歌公司化时搜索领域的现状。

David: I think it’s worth saying a little bit more about two other players to set the context. The first is Alta Vista. Folks who are old enough might remember Alta Vista pre-Google was pretty good.

大卫：我觉得先介绍两家同行有助于理解背景。第一家是 Alta Vista。年纪够大的听众大概记得，谷歌出现前 Alta Vista 还是挺好用的。

Ben: It was pretty good.

本：确实挺好。

David: Alta Vista has a fascinating history. This is wild. I didn’t know this until doing research for this episode. Do you know where AltaVista came from?

大卫：Alta Vista 的来历很有意思，这太疯狂了。我做这期节目研究时才知道。你知道 AltaVista 源自哪里吗？

Ben: I do. But most people don’t. DEC—Digital Equipment Corporation.

本：我知道，但大多数人不知道。DEC——数字设备公司。

David: DEC—Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory, which is their Palo Alto research lab, their equivalent of Bell Labs. But DEC, the company we talked all about in our Microsoft series where Dave Cutler came from, wrote Windows NT, a legendary company.

大卫：DEC——数字设备公司西部研究实验室，也就是他们在帕洛阿尔托的研究所，相当于他们的贝尔实验室。DEC 是我们在微软系列里反复提到的传奇公司，戴夫·卡特勒就出自那里，后来编写了 Windows NT。

Ben: Hardcore, enterprise, big hardware computing company.

本：硬核的企业级大型硬件计算公司。

David: The mini computer company. Judy Faulkner wrote Epic on a DEC mini computer, right?

大卫：小型机公司。朱迪·福克纳就是在 DEC 小型机上写出 Epic 的，对吧？

Ben: Yup.

本：对。

David: This is where Alta Vista came from. The big insight that they had was you can go crawl the web to build the index in parallel. Before Alta Vista, all the other web crawlers out there that were building search engines were just single-threaded processes. You’d go crawl one page and then you’d go crawl another page and then you’d go crawl another page. The Internet was small enough back then that people didn’t really think to do it any other way, because remember, it’s all growing so fast.

大卫：Alta Vista 就诞生于此。他们的重大洞见是：可以并行地爬取网络来构建索引。在 Alta Vista 之前，其他搜索引擎的爬虫都是单线程：先爬一个页面，再爬下一个。那时互联网还小，人们没想到用别的方法，因为增长太快了。

Ben: Oh, fascinating. And it’s a super parallelized process. Why not? Oh, and this makes sense because DEC hardware would be pretty well-suited for this. They’ve got a big enterprise appliance that they need applications for.

本：哦，太有意思了。本来就是高度可并行的过程，为什么不用并行？这也合理，因为 DEC 的硬件很适合干这个，他们有大型企业设备，需要用应用来发挥价值。

David: Exactly. This is why it was a research project at DEC. It was a way to show off the power of their latest enterprise-class servers that they were hawking. If you think about what are the competitive vectors of search, what makes one search engine better than others, it’s not just the ranking.

David：没错。这就是为什么它在 DEC 被当作研究项目——他们想借此展示其最新企业级服务器的强大性能。如果你思考搜索的竞争向量，是什么让一个搜索引擎优于另一个，关键不仅仅是排名。

Today, people think about PageRank and Google, the innovation, the ranking, and the relevancy that was the most important thing. There are actually two other vectors that are critical. One is speed—how fast are you going to return the results…

如今，人们想到 PageRank 和 Google——创新、排名和相关性被视为最重要的因素。实际上还有另外两个关键向量。其一是速度——返回结果有多快……

Ben: Which we take for granted today, but not too long before Google’s founding, search was a thing where you’d kick off a query, then go do something else, and wait for it to come back.

Ben：今天我们把这当作理所当然，但在 Google 成立前不久，搜索还是这样：你发出一个查询，然后去做别的事情，等它返回结果。

David: It was like AI today. You’re doing deep research. You’re just like, okay, great. Send a query, go get some lunch, come back.

David：这就像今天的人工智能。你在做深度研究，就会想，好吧，发出查询，去吃个午饭，再回来。

Ben: So funny.

Ben：太有趣了。

David: Exactly. We’ll get more into speed in a minute. But the other attribute that’s super important is the index. How big is the index of pages that you’re searching across? Before Alta Vista and parallelization of crawling all the indexes of all the other search engines were super small. Maybe a million pages was the biggest. You could have the best search engine in the world, but if you’re only getting a small percentage of the actual sites out there that it’s searching, it’s not going to be that useful.

David：没错。我们稍后会再谈速度。但另一个非常重要的属性是索引。你要搜索的网页索引有多大？在 AltaVista 及其并行化爬取之前，其他所有搜索引擎的索引都非常小。最大的也许只有一百万页。即使你拥有世界上最好的搜索引擎，如果你只能覆盖实际站点的一小部分，它也不会太有用。

Ben: And the funny thing about this period of time, too, is very rarely were people actually updating their index. When something would say a million pages crawled, that was cumulative. They just kept adding new sites to it and assuming you weren’t doing many updates.

Ben：有趣的是，那段时间里，人们几乎从不真正更新他们的索引。所谓“已抓取一百万页”的数字其实是累积值，他们只是不断地把新站点加进去，并假设你不会进行太多更新。

David: Oh man, how times have changed. When Alta Vista spins out of DEC and launches as a commercial company and entity in and of itself, its big claim to fame is its index. It has 16 million pages in its index versus the competitors.

David：天哪，时过境迁。当 AltaVista 从 DEC 分拆出来、以独立商业公司身份推出时，它最大的卖点就是索引量——它的索引页数达到 1600 万页，远超竞争对手。

Altavista still sucked at relevancy and speed. The information retrieval algorithms that AltaVista and others were using was highly based on how many times a given query word appeared on the page. If you wanted to rank highly for dog food, you just spam dog food in invisible text all over your page.

AltaVista 在相关性和速度方面仍然很糟糕。AltaVista 及其他搜索引擎采用的信息检索算法高度依赖查询词在页面上出现的次数。如果你想在“狗粮”关键词下排名靠前，只需在页面上用隐形文字疯狂堆砌“狗粮”即可。

Ben: Or even not invisible. You just want to make the dog foodiest dog food page on the web.

Ben：甚至不用隐形文字——只要把网页打造成互联网上最“狗粮味十足”的狗粮页面。

David: Exactly. The other thing that (I guess) Alt Vista was probably fine at this but not good, was speed. That was a particular problem. AltaVista had great hardware from DEC.

David：没错。另外一件事——我想 AltaVista 可能算“还行”但并不好——就是速度，这尤其是个问题。虽然 AltaVista 拥有 DEC 的优秀硬件。

Ben: And really expensive hardware, too. That’s the main thing to underscore here is that yeah, they’re doing this cool parallelization thing, which leads to a bigger index. But if they had to be their own company, is an extremely expensive company to run to have all that DEC hardware for search, which we should say doesn’t have a great business model yet.

Ben：而且这些硬件非常昂贵。重点在于，他们确实通过很酷的并行化实现了更大的索引，但如果作为一家独立公司运营，为搜索配备这些 DEC 机器成本极高，更别提当时还没有成熟的商业模式。

The business model is just banner ads, low price, not very targeted. That would all come later. So the whole search market, why would anyone take it seriously? Because to date, it doesn’t feel like there’s a good business there. To do a really good job at it, it would be very expensive to run.

当时的商业模式只是横幅广告，价格低、定位也不精准。这些改进都要等后来。因而整个搜索市场乏人问津——迄今为止似乎没有好的盈利模式，而要把搜索真正做好，运营成本又会非常高。

It is funny. As you can imagine, the powers that be at DEC are pushing really hard on, can we sell more of these boxes? Do they really want to be the ones developing the best search engine? Or really what they want is for other people to be developing stuff like this, see it as a proof of concept, and then start their own companies to buy more and more DEC hardware.

有趣的是，可想而知 DEC 的高层极力推动“我们能卖出更多机器吗？”他们真的想自己开发最好的搜索引擎吗？其实他们更希望别人来开发类似项目，把它视作概念验证，然后自立门户，买越来越多的 DEC 硬件。

今天卖芯片同时做模型的NVIDIA。

David: Exactly, Ben. Search as an industry was not interesting. (1) Because the economic upside was capped. And (2) also, people love directories and portals and Yahoo. Yahoo was the big player, not Alta Vista or Excite or Lycos or Infoseek, any of these others.

David：没错，Ben。作为一个行业，搜索当时并不吸引人。（1）因为经济上限受限；（2）人们当时更喜欢目录、门户及 Yahoo。真正的大玩家是 Yahoo，而不是 AltaVista、Excite、Lycos 或 Infoseek 等其他搜索引擎。

Yahoo was the site that was taking off like wildfire. They’d gone public in 1996 at a billion dollar market cap. By 1998 when google.com is launching as a company, Yahoo’s a \$20 billion public stock. This is the juggernaut.

Yahoo 的增长势如野火。它在 1996 年上市时市值 10 亿美元。到 1998 年 google.com 刚成立时，Yahoo 已是市值 200 亿美元的上市公司，堪称巨无霸。

What was so great about Yahoo—yes, it was started by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two other Stanford PhDs—it wasn’t technology-driven. It started as Dave and Jerry’s Guide to the Internet. It didn’t start as their academic research.

Yahoo 的伟大之处在于——是的，它由另两位斯坦福博士 Jerry Yang 和 David Filo 创立——但它并非技术驱动。最初它叫“Dave and Jerry’s Guide to the Internet”，并非源于他们的学术研究。

What Yahoo was was exactly that. It was a hand-curated guide directory to the Internet. It was like the yellow pages with even better annotations to why you would want to look at a particular given site. That’s what people thought. Oh, technology search engines will never be able to replace human curation and human thought about what the most interesting sites on the web are. Hell, this is why Larry’s original idea was this annotation idea, was humans who are going to rank things.

Yahoo 本质上就是这样：一个人工策划的互联网目录，就像带有更好注释的黄页，告诉你为何要访问某个站点。那时人们认为，技术型搜索引擎永远无法取代人类对网络上最有趣网站的人工筛选与思考。这也是为何 Larry 的最初想法是做“注释”——让人来为网页打分排序。

Ben: And for the size that the web was at the time, Yahoo was correct. When you have a small number of total websites, curating them is interesting. But when you have 10,000 times more websites and 10,000 times more niches that people are interested in, directory is not going to be an efficient way to surface what people are looking for. If you believed that the Internet was going to get as big as it did, search became a more interesting front door. But for this period of time, directory was an amazing front door to the Internet.

Ben：以当时网络的规模而言，Yahoo 是正确的。当网站总量很少时，人工策展很有趣。但当网站数量扩大一万倍、细分兴趣也扩大一万倍时，目录就无法高效呈现用户想找的内容。如果你相信互联网会像后来那样庞大，搜索就成了更有趣的入口。但在那个时期，目录仍是出色的互联网入口。

David: Yup. Now here we are in 1998. The Internet is already big enough that yes, it’s clear there are a lot more interesting webpages out there.

David：是啊。现在来到 1998 年，互联网已经足够大，显然还有更多有趣的网页等待被发现。

Ben: Yahoo has search to address that?

Ben：Yahoo 有搜索功能来应对这一点吗？

David: Exactly. The model was hybrid. All these portals, Yahoo included, went hybrid. When you search on Yahoo, the results you get at the top of the page are their hand-curated directory-driven results. Then they backfill with a search engine. They would partner with these search engines to provide backfill results. People thought that this was the ideal solution.

David：没错。这是一种混合模式。所有这些门户网站，包括 Yahoo，都采用了混合模式。当你在 Yahoo 上搜索时，页面顶部显示的是他们人工策划、基于目录的结果。随后，他们用搜索引擎进行回填，与这些搜索引擎合作提供补充结果。人们当时认为这是理想方案。

今天Google自己搞成了混合模式，而OpenAI直接采用订阅模式而不是广告模式。

Ben: So interesting. It is the epitome of just good enough technology. It was so different than Google. Google wants to be the very best technology solution for a problem, the most elegant, and (I think) the Yahoo solution was very yeah, yeah, yeah. Search just has to be good enough. The curation is the thing that matters.

Ben：太有意思了。这简直是“差不多就行”技术的典范，与 Google 截然不同。Google 追求为问题提供最优秀、最优雅的技术解决方案，而我觉得 Yahoo 的做法更像是“行吧行吧”，搜索做到够用即可，关键在于人工策展。

We’re a media company. We have enough human editors to cover all the big categories. But the business is showing banner ads. They may or may not be relevant to whatever page you happen to be looking at right now. We’re effectively a media company that has search just in case.

我们是一家媒体公司。我们拥有足够的人工编辑覆盖所有主要分类。但我们的业务是展示横幅广告，广告可能与您当下浏览的页面相关，也可能不相关。本质上，我们是一家“顺带做搜索”的媒体公司。

Okay, that’s what’s going on at Yahoo and all the portals. The opinion of Larry and Sergey is, we don’t want to do a homepage like that. We don’t want to clutter it up. Our whole point is to help people find what they want, which of course raises the question, well what’s the business then? Because if you’re not keeping people on site to see your banner ads, the only moment that you really have is on the search box page and on the search results page. They were extremely against, well really ads, generally. They didn’t think it was good for users. But they were just against especially banner ads.

这就是 Yahoo 及所有门户网站当时的运作方式。Larry 和 Sergey 的观点是：我们不想做那样的首页，不想让页面杂乱无章。我们的全部目标是帮助人们找到他们想要的东西，这自然引出一个问题：那商业模式是什么？如果你不把用户留在站内看横幅广告，你真正的展示时刻只剩搜索框页面和搜索结果页面。他们非常反感广告，尤其是横幅广告，认为这对用户不利。

There’s this scary thing, which doesn’t seem scary now because we know how it played out. But just imagine trying to evaluate this company. It’s growing like wildfire. Everyone’s using it. There’s one known business model for this entire sector. It’s not a great one, but it is known, and these guys are dead set against using it.

当时有件事看起来挺可怕——如今看不可怕，因为我们知道结局。但试想你要评估这家公司：它增长如野火，人人都在用。整个行业已知的商业模式只有一种，虽然不算理想，但至少存在，而他们却坚决不用。

But on the other hand, let me pitch it to you a different way. These guys are building the front door to the Internet, which was just growing 700% year over year. Isn’t that going to be really valuable? Yes, but we don’t know how yet.

但从另一个角度看：他们在打造互联网的前门，而互联网当时正以每年 700% 的速度增长。这难道不会非常有价值吗？会的，但我们还不知道如何变现。

David: But the problem is actually even more dire than what you’re saying. As usage is growing, they need more infrastructure. But they’re not making any money.

David：但问题比你说的更严峻。随着使用量增长，他们需要更多基础设施，但又赚不到钱。

Ben: Right, and for each piece of this, you need more infrastructure. You need the crawler to go crawl the whole web and store, not entire webpages, but little pieces of webpages that you can reference from your index. You need the index itself. You need to serve the webpages up for when people are doing the searches. There are a bunch of components of this infrastructure that all need to scale and they all need to scale differently.

Ben：没错，而且每个环节都需要更多基础设施。你需要爬虫抓遍全网，存储的不是整页，而是可供索引引用的网页片段；需要索引本身；还要在用户搜索时提供网页结果。所有这些基础设施组件都必须扩展，而且各自的扩展方式不同。

David: Which brings us to really, what is the second big reason why Google worked so well and became the Google we all know today. One is accurate, relevant, fast search results, PageRank, and everything we’ve been covering. Two, though, is the infrastructure to actually make this whole thing work and scale efficiently.

David：这就引出了 Google 得以成功并成为今天 Google 的第二大原因。第一是准确、相关且快速的搜索结果、PageRank 等。第二则是支撑整个系统高效运行并扩展的基础设施。

Right after they raise the angel round, Larry and Sergey go out and they recruit just unbelievable top-tier engineers and computer scientists to come rewrite the code and work on this infrastructure problem. Pretty quickly, they get Urs Hölzle and then Jeff Dean, who are just these absolute legends. They’re both still at Google today.

在完成天使轮融资后，Larry 和 Sergey 迅速招募了顶尖工程师和计算机科学家来重写代码、解决基础设施问题。他们很快就请到了 Urs Hölzle 和 Jeff Dean——绝对的传奇人物，如今仍在 Google 工作。

Urs is now a fellow, but he ran all of Google’s infrastructure from 1999 until 2023. Before joining, he’s done his PhD at Stanford and he was a professor at UCSB. He’d also written the primary Java Virtual Machine that Sun used as the official Java Virtual Machine. Larry and Sergey recruit him out of academia to come join as employee number eight. His initial job title was Search Engine Mechanic because “everything was broken.”

Urs 现在是 Google Fellow，但他在 1999 至 2023 年期间负责整个 Google 的基础设施。加入前，他在斯坦福完成博士学位，并在加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校任教，还编写了 Sun 官方 Java 虚拟机的主要实现。Larry 和 Sergey 将他从学术界挖来，成为公司第八号员工，他的初始职位叫“搜索引擎技工”，因为“所有东西都坏了”。

So that’s Urs. He builds all this incredible infrastructure.

这就是 Urs，他打造了这一切令人惊叹的基础设施。

Jeff Dean, who they also recruit around the same time—

Jeff Dean，他们在差不多同一时间也招募了他——

Ben: From DEC, right?

Ben：来自 DEC，对吗？

Ben: At DEC, yes. Jeff is basically Google’s Dave Cutler. Today, Jeff runs AI at Google. He also implemented the first version of AdWords, built AdSense, rewrote the course search pipeline five times, co-invented and implemented Bigtable, MapReduce, TensorFlow, and Gemini. He actually keeps his resume up-to-date online. We’ll link to it in the show notes. It’s incredible.

Ben：没错，在 DEC 时。Jeff 基本上是 Google 的 Dave Cutler。如今他主管 Google 的 AI。他还实现了第一版 AdWords、构建了 AdSense、五次重写课程搜索流水线，并共同发明并实现了 Bigtable、MapReduce、TensorFlow 和 Gemini。他甚至在网上保持简历实时更新。我们会在节目注释中提供链接。真是令人惊叹。

Ben: We’re bearing a little bit of a lead here. We spoke with Jeff to prep for this episode and I watched a handful of talks he’s given. Delightful human, and God, what a great engineer.

Ben：我们有点埋没了重点。为了准备本期节目，我们和 Jeff 交流过，我也看了他的一些演讲。他为人随和，真是一位出色的工程师。

David: Just generational talent. But this is that early nucleus of engineers that Google recruited. It’s amazing that they attracted them because prospects were not good that all of this would work in scale. It was only because of these guys that it did.

David：真正的时代级人才。但这正是 Google 早期招募的工程师核心。令人惊讶的是，在一切能否规模化尚不明朗时，他们竟能吸引到这些人。正因为有了他们，一切才得以实现。

Ben: Here’s the crazy thing. Later—there’s an easy point to make—Google got to hoover up all the best talent because they were a solid business after the dot-com crash. But this in 98–99, we’re in the go-go times. The dot-com bubble hadn’t burst yet, and Larry and Sergey managed to recruit this talent.

Ben：疯狂的是，后来——这很容易理解——互联网泡沫破裂后，Google 已是一家稳健的企业，因此能够网罗所有顶尖人才。但在 98–99 年的繁荣时期，泡沫尚未破灭，Larry 和 Sergey 就设法招揽了这些人才。

I think this is like a ‘history turns on a knife point’ or a ‘make or break the company’ thing. The fact that they were able to get these guys in a hot talent market really speaks to Larry and Sergey’s vision, the excitement around the idea, how novel their approach was, everything.

我认为这堪称“历史的关键转折”或“决定公司存亡”的时刻。能够在炙手可热的人才市场招到这些人，充分体现了 Larry 和 Sergey 的远见、理念的吸引力以及方法的独特性等方方面面。

David: And part of the reason why this talent was attracted to Google, sure, some of it was like, oh, the product’s really good and people are using it, so that makes the company interesting. The other part of it, though, is that the technical challenges and the architecture coming out of Stanford was super unique and novel. This was a really, really interesting thing to work on. Why was that?

David：吸引这些人才加入 Google 的部分原因，当然是产品优秀、用户众多，使得公司本身就很有趣。而另一个原因是源自斯坦福的技术挑战和架构极其独特、新颖，这是一项非常有趣的工作。为什么会这样？

The Google index that they needed to build and operate on for the search engine, for PageRank to work, was so much bigger than any other index out there. Google needed the entire page to compute all the rankings and find the links, find the backlinks. They needed to architect Google with this huge distributed computing system. The index was so big that it wouldn’t fit on a single machine or a single server no matter how big or how expensive.

他们为搜索引擎、为 PageRank 构建并运作的 Google 索引，比任何其他索引都要庞大。Google 需要整页内容来计算全部排名、查找链接和反向链接。他们必须用庞大的分布式计算系统来架构 Google。索引大到即便再高端昂贵的单机或服务器也装不下。

What they do to store the index and to operate on it with this distributed file system, is they break the giant index into tons and tons and tons of little chunks, they’re called, of individual 64 megabyte files. Small files. Tractable files. They get stored on lots and lots of different disks, lots of different machines, lots of different servers, and ultimately different data centers all over the world.

为在分布式文件系统中存储并操作该索引，他们将庞大的索引拆分成无数小块，每块是 64 MB 的独立文件——小文件，易于处理的文件。它们被存储在大量不同的磁盘、机器、服务器上，最终分布于全球各地的数据中心。

Then there’s a separate server that keeps a master mapping of all the chunks, where the chunks physically are. When a query comes in and needs to operate on the index data, the master server just returns only the chunks that it needs, not the whole index. That makes the whole thing possible.

随后有一台独立服务器保存所有块的主映射，记录它们的物理位置。当查询到来需要操作索引数据时，主服务器只返回所需的块，而不是整个索引。这让一切成为可能。

Ben: Basically, that one server you’re talking about can just say, oh, all the chunks are here on all these different machines that are distributed throughout my data center. Just look at those chunks. That way it can just pull in a parallel way from all those different chunks concurrently.

Ben：简而言之，你提到的那台服务器会说：哦，这些块都位于数据中心中分布的各台机器上，只需查看这些块即可。这样它就能并行地从所有不同的块中同时读取数据。

David: Yup. I think that’s even abstracted. From a computer perspective, they see the master map, they feel like they have access to the whole file, but then what’s actually getting returned to them to operate on is only just the chunk data that they need.

David：对。我认为这甚至是抽象化的。从计算机的角度看，它们看到的是主映射，仿佛可以访问整个文件，但实际返回供其操作的只有所需的块数据。

Ben: Google was forced to do distributed computing because their index file was too large to store on any one machine, no matter how big or fancy it could be.

Ben：Google 被迫进行分布式计算，因为他们的索引文件太大，任何一台机器——无论多么强大或高端——都无法单独存储。

David: I think that’s right, which enables the whole thing in the first place and is technically extremely interesting. But now the physical infrastructure side, because you have all these chunks and they can live anywhere. Larry and Sergey already had to grab commodity hardware—hard drives and motherboards—directly back at Stanford.

David：我觉得没错，这首先让整件事成为可能，而且在技术上非常有趣。不过现在从物理基础设施来看，因为你有这么多数据块，它们可以存放在任何地方。Larry 和 Sergey 早在斯坦福时就得直接采购普通硬盘和主板等廉价硬件。

Well, Urs comes in and he’s like, oh, we can just keep going with this. Let’s keep using cheap commodity components and hardware. Yeah, they’ll suck and they’ll fail a lot and things will burn out, but that’s okay because we’ve got this distributed file system, we’ll just replicate everything three or five times.

随后 Urs 加入，他的态度是：哦，我们就这样继续下去吧，继续使用廉价通用的硬件组件。是的，它们糟糕、故障率高、容易烧坏，但没关系，因为我们有分布式文件系统，只需把所有数据复制三到五份即可。

Ben: And we can cleverly design software to account for the fact that we have commodity hardware, commodity RAM, these systems that were not assembled with the notion of being enterprise-grade. We can design Google with the idea to take into account the fact that the hardware is not enterprise-grade. That means we can get cheaper hardware and run in a distributed computing way.

Ben：而且我们可以巧妙地设计软件来适应这些通用硬件、普通内存，这些并非按企业级标准组装的系统。我们可以在设计 Google 时充分考虑这一点——硬件不是企业级的——这意味着我们能用更便宜的硬件，以分布式计算方式运行。

Frankly, I think this makes it interesting to a lot of engineers who want to work on hard problems. How do I design a system when I can’t count on a whole bunch of stuff from the underlying hardware that I would get to count on if it was a fancy DEC server?

坦率地说，这让很多想攻克难题的工程师觉得很有意思：当我无法指望底层硬件提供那些在高端 DEC 服务器上理所当然的保障时，我该如何设计系统？

David: I read that industry average server hardware failure rate at the time was around 3%–4% per year. Google’s hardware failure was over 10% per year. But the whole system was designed that it didn’t matter. It was all just replicated.

David：我看到当时业界服务器硬件的平均年故障率约为 3%–4%，而 Google 的硬件年故障率超过 10%。但整个系统的设计让这一切无关紧要，因为所有数据都是冗余复制的。

Ben: Super interesting.

Ben：太有意思了。

David: This keeps scaling up and up and up over the years with Google. Pretty quickly, maybe even while Google is still a private company, they technically become the world’s largest computer manufacturer.

David：多年里，Google 持续不断地扩大规模。很快，甚至可能还在公司未上市时，他们在技术上就成了全球最大的计算机制造商。

Ben: Oh wow.

Ben：哇哦。

David: Because they’re not buying fully-baked servers. They’re just buying components and assembling them into this sea of components.

David：因为他们不买完整的服务器，他们只采购零部件，然后把它们组装成一望无际的硬件海洋。

Ben: Proto data center.

Ben：原型数据中心。

David: In their data center and then data centers.

David：先是在他们的数据中心，随后是多个数据中心。

Ben: And their early data centers, they’re never really putting them in PC housing, right?

Ben：而且他们早期的数据中心里，这些硬件从来都没装进 PC 机箱，对吧？

David: Yes. These early “machines” they’re building, they’re not even putting PC cases on them. They just mount the motherboards directly on corkboard. Then they put the RAM and hard drives in there, and then they just stuff them in their data center racks.

David：是的。他们构建的这些早期“机器”甚至连机箱都没有，只是把主板直接固定在软木板上，然后插上内存和硬盘，再把整块板子塞进数据中心机架里。

Ben: The photos of these early Google “server racks” are crazy because the way that their agreements worked in the co-located data center facility is they would lease by square footage, not by energy consumed, by square footage.

Ben：这些早期 Google “服务器机架”的照片非常惊人，因为在托管数据中心里，他们的协议是按占地面积而不是耗电量来租赁的——按面积计费。

When you give a computer scientist a constraint, they will optimize for it. The goal is how much of Google can I power in this square footage? The way that you optimize around that is, well, incredible density of hardware.

当你给计算机科学家设定一个约束，他们就会为此进行优化。目标是：在这片面积内，我能为多少 Google 服务供电？优化方式就是——极端的硬件密度。

We’re not putting cases on these computers. We’re putting corkboards in. Imagine just a sheet of cork, which is an insulator, so that these electrical components that you don’t want to conduct between each other are not going to conduct between each other. You just stuff a server rack full of corkboards with all this commodity hardware strewn about it. It looks unbelievably messy. It’s extremely economical. Then you just handle it all in software.

我们不给这些电脑装机箱，而是用软木板。想象一张软木板，作为绝缘体，可以防止各个电子元件间的意外导电。你就在服务器机架里塞满装着各类通用硬件的软木板，看上去乱得不可思议，却极其经济，然后通过软件来管理一切。

David: And the net of this is that Google can scale, period, but also can scale way more cheaply as search traffic rises and as the index keeps growing and getting bigger than anyone else out there on the market. Once the business model kicks in, this is why Google search has a 87% gross margin on it.

David：结果就是，Google 不仅能够扩展，而且随着搜索流量增加、索引规模超越市场上任何竞争对手，其扩展成本也极低。一旦商业模式启动，这就是 Google 搜索能保持 87% 毛利率的原因。

There’s this incredible story of Google’s first data center, was a co-location data center facility, a shared physical space in Santa Clara called Exodus. The data center cage, the space that Google had allocated was right next to the cage for Inktomi, which was a competing search engine out there that we’ll talk about in a minute.

有一个关于 Google 首个数据中心的精彩故事：它位于圣克拉拉一家名为 Exodus 的联合托管数据中心，是一块共享的物理空间。Google 租用的数据中心笼位紧挨着 Inktomi 的笼位，Inktomi 是当时的竞争搜索引擎，稍后我们会谈到。

Google folks talk about, the Inktomi cage had all these gleaming Sun machines, lots of space and lots of airflow, and all this incredible cable management. Then you had this Frankenstein Google thing next to it.

Google 的员工说，Inktomi 的笼位里摆满了闪闪发光的 Sun 服务器，空间宽敞，通风良好，布线管理也无可挑剔。而紧挨着它的，就是 Google 拼凑出来的“弗兰肯斯坦式”怪物。

To your point Ben, they were only paying by square footage. They weren’t paying for power. They were sucking up all the power of the data center. I heard a story that they actually at one point may or may not have stolen a power circuit from the Inktomi cage next door.

正如你所说的，Ben，他们只按占地面积付费，而不按用电量付费。他们占用了整个数据中心的电力。我听说他们有一次甚至可能从隔壁 Inktomi 的笼位“借”走了一路电源。

Ben: Borrowed. Borrowed.

Ben：借走，借走。

David: Borrowed. Borrowed. Yes.

David：借走，借走，是的。

Ben: One fun illustration of what it means to be on commodity hardware versus enterprise-grade hardware, Jeff Dean shared a fun story with us. On enterprise-grade hardware, you would have something in RAM which is called a parity bit. In consumer-grade hardware you don’t.

Ben：关于使用通用硬件与企业级硬件的区别，Jeff Dean 给我们分享了一个有趣的故事。在企业级硬件的内存中会有一种叫做奇偶校验位（parity bit）的东西，而消费级硬件则没有。

What is a parity bit? A parity bit adds one extra bit to memory that is basically for error checking. It looks at the rest of the data in the byte and if it’s even, it’ll set the parity bit to one. If it’s odd, it’ll set the parity bit to zero.

什么是奇偶校验位？奇偶校验位是在内存中额外添加的一位，用于错误校验。它查看字节中的其余数据，如果是偶数，就把奇偶位设为 1；如果是奇数，就设为 0。

The con of this is now you need an extra bit. That makes the overall machine more expensive because you’re losing one-eighth of the RAM to this parity checking. But the benefit is, you know that nothing ever got corrupted because the likelihood that one of your bits got flipped (and it also flipped your parity bit) is very low.

缺点是你需要额外的一位，这会让整台机器更昂贵，因为你将失去八分之一的内存做奇偶校验。但好处是你能确保数据不会损坏，因为某个位翻转且同时翻转奇偶位的概率极低。

You can check and see, wait. It’s supposed to be an odd number according to the parity bit, but it’s an even number. Likely something went wrong. When I say something went wrong, this is from random radiation that is just flying around the universe. At any given time—

你可以检查并发现：等等，根据奇偶位，应该是奇数，但现在是偶数，很可能出了问题。我所说的“出问题”可能是宇宙间随机辐射导致的位翻转。任何时候——

David: Stuff goes wrong all the time.

David：事情总是会出错的。

Ben: Well because Google is using this commodity hardware, they then have to do these crazy things in software and build all these layers themselves to say we’re running on crap hardware. We don’t know for sure that the value in memory is correct. Can we have a second way of verifying that it’s correct? It’s that, I don’t know, cool software engineering but also another layer of systems that you have to build when you’re on commodity hardware.

Ben：由于 Google 使用的是这些通用硬件，他们就必须在软件中做各种疯狂的事情，自己构建多层系统，以应对“我们运行在劣质硬件上”的现实。我们无法确定内存中的值是否正确，那能否有第二种方式来验证它？这既是很酷的软件工程，也是使用通用硬件时必须构建的另一层系统。

David: So the net of these constraints and the incredible technical team Google has, is that they design everything from the ground up—the computing systems, the file systems, the data centers, the racks, the hardware, everything. They built stuff like GFS (the Google File System), MapReduce. Yahoo would eventually feel like they needed to copy MapReduce to be competitive, and they would open source that as Hadoop. If you look at Apache Hadoop, that is a Yahoo copy of Google’s MapReduce.

David：因此，在这些约束与 Google 出色技术团队的共同作用下，他们从零开始设计了所有东西——计算系统、文件系统、数据中心、机架、硬件等等。他们构建了诸如 GFS（Google 文件系统）、MapReduce 等系统。Yahoo 最终认为为了保持竞争力必须复制 MapReduce，并将其开源为 Hadoop。如果你看 Apache Hadoop，那就是 Yahoo 对 Google MapReduce 的复刻。

Ben: Of course shepherded and stewarded mostly by people outside of Yahoo eventually, but that’s where it came from.

Ben：当然，后来主要由 Yahoo 外部人士维护和推动，但它的确起源于此。

David: Then ultimately, because Google is building their own hardware racks, data centers, and they can do it cheaply, they put data centers all over the world. That means they can deliver search and ad results instantly to users all over the globe.

David：最终，由于 Google 自行构建硬件机架和数据中心且成本低廉，他们在全球各地部署了数据中心，这意味着他们能即时向全球用户提供搜索和广告结果。

Ben: This speed really starts to become a bragging point for Google, where whenever you do a query, it’ll show you how long the query took. It’s usually like a quarter second. They used to brag about the index size, now they say I’m returning a gajillion results to you. But this was a really big flex for a long time.

Ben：这一速度真正成为 Google 的炫耀资本——每当你进行查询，它都会显示用时，通常只有约四分之一秒。他们过去吹嘘索引规模，现在则说给你返回海量结果。长期以来，这一直是他们的大招。

As we searched a huge index, billions of pages, we found a huge number of results. And we did it really fast. We’re going to show all those numbers to you because: (a) we’re engineers who are awesome, but (b) we know it’s the best stats that anyone out there could report to you.

我们在庞大的索引中——数十亿网页——进行搜索，得到了海量结果，而且速度极快。我们会把这些数字都展示给你，因为：(a) 我们是很棒的工程师；(b) 我们知道这是任何同行能向你报告的最佳数据。

David: It’s a stake in the ground. All this grows out of the constraints of they don’t have any money. First at Stanford and then this little angel around they raised.

David：这是一根标杆。所有这些都源于他们资金匮乏的限制——先是在斯坦福时期，然后是那次小小的天使轮融资。

Ben: They don’t have a way to generate any money.

Ben：他们没有任何盈利方式。

David: And yeah, they don’t have any way to generate any money. We cannot overstate how important Google’s infrastructure innovations were. All this comes out of these constraints that Google the company has. But none of this would’ve mattered if they didn’t figure out the business model.

David：是的，他们确实没有任何赚钱的方法。我们怎么强调 Google 的基础设施创新都不为过。这一切都源自 Google 公司的各种限制。但如果他们没能找到合适的商业模式，这一切都将毫无意义。

But before we tell the story of the building of the best business model of all time, now is the perfect time…

但在我们讲述史上最佳商业模式的构建历程之前，现在正是……

Ben: To thank a new friend of the show, Anthropic, and their AI assistant, Claude.

Ben：感谢节目新的朋友——Anthropic 以及他们的 AI 助手 Claude。

David: As we were doing our research for this episode, looking through decades of interviews, SEC filings, technical papers, Claude was an awesome research partner.

David：在我们为本期节目做研究、查阅数十年的访谈、SEC 文件和技术论文时，Claude 是一位出色的研究伙伴。

I actually had this crazy thing happen. I’ve never had this happen before. I was asking Claude a bunch of questions about early Google financials, and it kept giving me numbers that I thought were wrong. But the numbers it was giving me were consistent, so I went back and I checked against the numbers in the book I’d been using. It turns out that Google actually restated their early financials and Claude was all over it. Claude actually saved me from making a somewhat meaningful error later in this episode. I’ve never had AI do that before.

我遇到了一件疯狂的事，我以前从没遇到过。我问 Claude 很多关于 Google 早期财务的问题，它不断给出我认为错误的数字。但它提供的数字非常一致，于是我回去对照自己正在使用的那本书中的数据。结果发现 Google 事实上重新列报了早期财务数据，而 Claude 全都捕捉到了。Claude 实际上帮我避免了在本期节目后面犯一个相当严重的错误。我以前从没见过 AI 做到这一点。

Ben: Now I wish we had Claude for all 200 of our other episodes. I also played around with Claude’s extended thinking mode in my research, especially analyzing Google’s S-1, which gave me a bunch of great insights that we’ll share later in the episode.

Ben：现在我真希望我们之前的 200 期节目都有 Claude 的帮助。我在研究中也使用了 Claude 的扩展思考模式，尤其是分析 Google 的 S-1 文件，这为我提供了大量很棒的洞见，稍后在节目中我们会分享。

David: This type of research is where Claude really shines compared to traditional web search. Claude can analyze hundreds of pages of documents simultaneously, and now with its connection to Google Workspace, it can pull insights from files in Google Drive, check Gmail, and search the latest information, all while maintaining context about what you’re actually trying to understand.

David：相比传统网络搜索，这类研究正是 Claude 大显身手的地方。Claude 能同时分析数百页文档，现在借助其与 Google Workspace 的连接，还能从 Google Drive 的文件中提取见解、查看 Gmail，并搜索最新信息，同时保持对你真正想理解内容的上下文。

Ben: And Claude is built by Anthropic, so you know it has a focus on being helpful, harmless, and honest. When you’re doing serious research like we do here at Acquired, you need an AI you can trust to be accurate and not just impressive.

Ben：而且 Claude 出自 Anthropic，因此你知道它专注于有用、无害且诚实。当你像我们在 Acquired 这样进行严肃研究时，你需要一款既准确又可靠，而不只是看起来厉害的 AI。

David: Plus Claude’s new Opus 4 is widely regarded as the world’s best coding model. As you can imagine, we talk to a lot of engineers doing what we do, and we keep hearing over and over again from developers that Claude is their favorite model.

David：此外，Claude 的全新 Opus 4 被广泛认为是全球最佳编码模型。你可以想象，凭我们所做的工作，我们会接触到很多工程师，而我们反复听到开发者说 Claude 是他们最喜欢的模型。

Ben: Acquired listeners can get half price on Claude Pro for three months using our link at claude.ai/acquired, or click the link in the show notes.

Ben：通过我们在 claude.ai/acquired 的链接或在节目笔记中的链接，Acquired 的听众可以以半价订阅 Claude Pro 三个月。

David: Claude thinks with you, not for you. Trust us when you’re trying to untangle 25 years of Google history, that makes all the difference. Our thanks to Claude and Anthropic.

David：Claude 是与你一起思考，而不是替你思考。当你试图理清 25 年的 Google 历史时，相信我们，这将产生巨大的差异。感谢 Claude 和 Anthropic。

Ben: All right, David, going from having no business to the greatest business model humankind has ever discovered, not exactly a straight line, huh?

Ben：好吧，David，从一无所营到拥有人类迄今发现的最伟大商业模式，这可不是一条直线，对吧？

David: No, not at all. How does it all start? Early 1999, even despite the incredible infrastructure work and being able to scale cheaply, Google’s still running out of money from the angel round.

David：完全不是。那么这一切是如何开始的呢？1999 年初，尽管有着令人难以置信的基础设施工作并能以低成本扩展，Google 仍在消耗天使轮资金并即将耗尽资金。

They hire a recent Stanford undergrad named Salar Kamangar who joins Google as employee number nine. Like many Stanford students at the time, he started using the search product while he was an undergrad, was blown away, and he’s like, I got to go work for this company. He basically bangs down Google’s door, tries to get hired, finally they’re like, okay, okay, come on in.

他们雇佣了一位刚毕业的斯坦福本科生 Salar Kamangar，成为 Google 的第九号员工。像当时的许多斯坦福学生一样，他在本科期间开始使用这款搜索产品，被其震撼到，于是他说，我必须去这家公司工作。他几乎是敲着 Google 的门想要应聘，最终他们说，好吧好吧，进来吧。

The first thing that Larry and Sergey give to him to do is you might argue the most important thing at the company. They’re like, well we’re running out of money so we need to go raise venture capital. We don’t want to write the business plan in the pitch deck. You write the business plan in the pitch deck.

Larry 和 Sergey 给他的第一项任务可以说是公司最重要的事情。他们说，我们快没钱了，所以需要去筹集风险投资。我们不想在演示文稿里写商业计划书，你来写吧。

Sally goes off and he writes the pitch deck for the Google Series A, a collaboration with Larry and Sergey, and they come up with a three-pronged business model that they’re going to present to VCs, three ways that they’re going to make revenue.

Sally 离开去为 Google 的 A 轮融资撰写演示文稿，与 Larry 和 Sergey 合作，他们想出了一个三管齐下的商业模式，准备向风险投资人展示，也就是他们将如何创收的三种方式。

Ben: And it’s hand-wavy as hell.

Ben：而且这简直太含糊其辞了。

David: So number one, the biggest revenue driver projected going forward. The main Google business, innovative new business model that they’re going to pursue here. They are going to sell Google search technology to enterprises so that companies can use the same amazing consumer Google search technology to search their own documents and intranets. This is the business plan for Google for the Series A.

David：首先，预计未来最大的收入驱动。Google 的主要业务，他们将在此追求的创新新商业模式。他们将把 Google 的搜索技术出售给企业，使得公司能够使用同样令人惊叹的消费者级 Google 搜索技术来搜索自己的文档和内联网。这就是 Google 在 A 轮融资中的商业计划。

Ben: You know that this feels like to me? It feels like they’re saying google.com is so precious and amazing and special. We don’t want to risk it by having to make money on it. Can we make money doing something else with our technology that will fund what we really want to do, which is google.com?

Ben：你知道这让我有什么感觉吗？感觉就像他们在说 google.com 太珍贵、太惊人、太特别了，我们不想因为要赚钱而冒险。我们能否用我们的技术去做点别的赚钱，然后资助我们真正想做的 google.com？

David: It’s pretty funny to talk about this now in retrospect. They did have a couple of reasons why they thought this might work. Number one was all the way back at Stanford. BackRub and then Google had actually been used for this use case. You could use Google to search internal Stanford intranet stuff. And people did. It was a great experience for Stanford students.

David：现在回想起来这真是挺有趣的。他们之所以认为这可能奏效，有几个原因。第一可以追溯到斯坦福时期。BackRub 继而 Google 实际上曾用于这种场景。你可以用 Google 来搜索斯坦福内部的内联网内容，而且人们确实这么做了，对于斯坦福学生来说这是一次很棒的体验。

Also before the Series A, somehow Larry and Sergey had managed to actually sell one of these deals to the company Red Hat.

此外，在 A 轮融资之前，Larry 和 Sergey 不知怎么地真的把其中一笔交易卖给了 Red Hat 公司。

Ben: That’s right. That was their first revenue, right? Was Red Hat.

Ben：没错。他们的第一笔收入就是这个，对吧？来自 Red Hat。

David: Yeah, the open source Linux company. They sold this enterprise search deal to Red Hat for \$20,000. They’re like, oh great, there’s a market here. That was going to be the main business driver.

David：是的，就是那家开源 Linux 公司。他们把这笔企业搜索交易以 2 万美元卖给了 Red Hat。他们想：哦，太好了，这里有市场。这将成为主要的业务驱动。

Then there were going to be two other business lines too in the company. One was going to be, well sure, okay VCs, you make us. We’ll sell CPM banner ads the same way everybody else does. We’re not going to like it but we’ll put it in the business plan.

然后公司还打算再发展两条业务线。其中之一是——好吧，既然风投要求——我们会和其他公司一样出售 CPM 形式的横幅广告。我们并不喜欢这样，但会把它写进商业计划书。

Ben: And it seems like they didn’t think through it any more than that because I couldn’t find anything about, is that going to appear on the search results page, is that going to appear on google.com next to the search box? But it seems like it was never real enough to actually have a plan for it.

Ben：而且看起来他们并没有更深入地思考这件事，因为我找不到任何信息说明这些广告会出现在搜索结果页，还是显示在 google.com 的搜索框旁边？似乎这件事从来没有真实到需要制定具体方案的程度。

David: And indeed, the Series A pitch deck and business plan was intentionally vague. I think part of the reason Larry and Sergey were like, okay, Sally, new guy, you go do this, is they didn’t actually want to tell VCs that much.

David：的确，A 轮融资的路演材料和商业计划书本身就是刻意模糊的。我想 Larry 和 Sergey 让新人 Sally 去做这件事，很大程度上是因为他们并不想向风险投资人透露太多。

可能不是事实。

That was number two. Then number three was that they were going to license Google organic search results to portals and directories as essentially OEM search to backfill results like we were talking about with Yahoo. Other search engines were doing this. Inktomi had gotten started at this point in time. Inktomi was the nextdoor neighbor at the data center exodus in Santa Clara.

那是第二条业务线。第三条业务线是，他们打算把 Google 的自然搜索结果授权给门户网站和目录站，作为 OEM 搜索来填充结果，就像我们刚才谈到 Yahoo 的做法一样。其他搜索引擎当时也在这么做。Inktomi 此时已经起步；在圣克拉拉 Exodus 数据中心，Inktomi 的机柜就在隔壁。

Ben: And they built a sizable business selling white labeled organic search results to other portals.

Ben：他们通过向其他门户网站出售贴牌的自然搜索结果，建立了相当可观的业务规模。

David: Exactly. This was Inktomi’s whole business. They just sold organic search results white labeled to other portals.

David：正是如此。这就是 Inktomi 整个业务的核心——把贴牌的自然搜索结果卖给其他门户网站。

Ben: But there are 5 big customers and 50 total customers out there for this business.

Ben：但这个市场里也就 5 家大客户，总共只有 50 家客户。

David: Yup. This is the business plan, this is the pitch deck. They go out, remember we’re in spring 1999 here. Even though this is a little hair-brained, it’s still the dot-com bubble. Money is still flowing. There’s a great Michael Moritz quote in Steven Levy’s book, talking about this particular moment in time. He says, “Nobody’s feet were on the ground.” It’s a very sir Michael way of putting things.

David：没错。这就是商业计划，也是融资演示文稿。他们出去路演——记住，现在是 1999 年春季。即便这计划有点异想天开，但仍处在互联网泡沫时期，资金依旧滚滚而来。Steven Levy 的书里有一句 Michael Moritz 的精彩引语，形容那个时刻：“没人脚踏实地。”这真是一句典型的 Sir Michael 式表达。

Ben: That’s a deliciously Michael quote, yes.

Ben：太有 Michael 的味道了，确实。

David: And Google’s got all this usage, engagement, and growth numbers. Hey, internet companies trade on eyeballs, so of course this is going to be a hot deal.

David：谷歌拥有所有这些使用量、互动量和增长数据。嘿，互联网公司都是靠“眼球”交易的，所以这当然会是一笔热门交易。

Famously Kleiner and Sequoia end up splitting the deal. Michael Moritz and John Doerr, the two most legendary VCs in the world team up, join forces, split the deal, and they both join the board of Google at the Series A.

众所周知，Kleiner 和 Sequoia 最终平分了这笔投资。全球最传奇的两位风投 Michael Moritz 和 John Doerr 组队联手，分摊投资，并在 A 轮时同时加入谷歌董事会。

Ben: Which is unheard of. The fact that Larry and Sergey were able to say, you both only get 12.5% of this company and you have to do it together, they both must have really, really, really wanted to do the deal.

Ben：这在当时闻所未闻。Larry 和 Sergey 能够说“你们俩各拿公司 12.5% 股份，而且必须一起投”——他们一定是非常非常非常想做这笔交易。

David: That is true. I love that even today, even you have that opinion. We heard from folks in the research that this really was a Google PR master stroke to seed this narrative.

David：没错。我喜欢的是即便到今天，你依旧持这种看法。我们的研究显示，这确实是谷歌的一次公关妙招，用来塑造这一叙事。

Ben: Oh. Well they held a press conference in person with both Sir Michael and John Doerr there. It’s the first Google Press conference. Larry and Sergey are there in Google-branded shirts.

Ben：哦。当时他们现场举行了新闻发布会，Sir Michael 和 John Doerr 均到场。这是谷歌的第一次新闻发布会，Larry 与 Sergey 身着带有 Google 标识的衬衫亮相。

David: They made a big deal about this. The reality is Sequoia and Kleiner split tons of deals. This was not the first one. It may have been the first one that Michael and John split together, but they had been on boards together before. Maybe they’d done one round or the other, and Sequoia Kleiner split deals all the time. But hey, it was the dot-com era and everybody needed a PR strategy, and that one worked well.

David：他们把这事宣传得很大。其实 Sequoia 和 Kleiner 合作分投的案子多了去了，这并非首例。或许这是 Michael 和 John 首次共同分投，但他们之前也一起在董事会共事过，可能一前一后投资过轮次；Sequoia 与 Kleiner 时常联合分单。不过，那可是互联网时代，人人都需要公关策略，而这招非常奏效。

Ben: Fascinating.

Ben：太吸引人了。

David: But the point is this was a hot deal. There are all sorts of stories out there about other investors coming into the round or trying to get in or trying to get in later.

David：但关键在于，这的确是一笔热门交易。关于其他投资者想在这一轮或后续插足的传闻可谓层出不穷。

Ben: I think in the middle of negotiations, they got another term sheet at \$150 million valuation instead of \$100. But I think they were already pot committed to Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. I actually don’t know who the \$150 million came from, but I do know it was someone who Ram Shriram set up the meeting with.

Ben：我记得在谈判过程中，他们收到了另一份 1.5 亿美元估值的 term sheet，而不是 1 亿美元。但我想他们已经对 Sequoia 和 Kleiner Perkins 投资承诺太深，无法回头。我不知道 1.5 亿美元报价是谁开出的，但我知道是 Ram Shriram 促成的会面。

David: Interesting. And remember, Larry’s older brother had co-founded eGroups which Moritz had funded at this point. They knew they wanted to go with Sequoia and Kleiner. That was the goal all along.

David：有意思。别忘了，Larry 的哥哥当时共同创立了 eGroups，而 Moritz 也投了那家公司。他们一直很清楚自己想要选择 Sequoia 与 Kleiner，这从始至终都是目标。

Regardless, the round gets done. \$25 million total raise at a \$100 million post money valuation. \$100 million valuation was genuinely wild for the time. Even in the heyday of the dot-com craziness for a Series A and \$100 million post, that was newsworthy.

无论如何，这轮融资最终敲定——总计筹集 2500 万美元，投后估值 1 亿美元。对当时而言，1 亿美元的估值确实相当疯狂。即便在互联网泡沫最疯狂的时期，A 轮估值 1 亿美元也足够上头条。

Ben: So funny thinking about this today.

Ben：今天想起来真是太有趣了。

David: I know. Today it’s so clean. It’s so clean.

David：是啊。如今一切如此清晰，如此简洁。

Ben: The comp in today’s world is, imagine reading a headline that a Series A after a company just had a few angel investors got done at a multi-billion dollar valuation. That’s the way it would’ve felt in tech at the time.

Ben：如果放在今天的世界里，可以类比为：一家公司仅有几位天使投资人，A 轮融资就完成了数十亿美元估值的新闻标题。当时在科技圈里的感觉就是这样。

David: Totally. But despite that and despite all the hype around the Series A, there’s still an urgent imperative to make revenue. There’s 25 million in the bank now, but you’ve got VCs involved, and the playbook back in the dot-com days was invest in the company, get quick revenue, go public. So there’s a fire lid under Google to figure out the business model.

David：完全正确。但尽管如此，尽管 A 轮融资备受追捧，依然迫切需要创造收入。现在账上有 2500 万美元，但有风险投资介入，而在互联网泡沫时代的剧本是：投资公司、快速盈利、上市。因此，Google 必须抓紧时间找出商业模式。

Right around the same time as the Series A happens, Larry and Sergey meet a guy from Netscape named Omid Kordestani.

就在 A 轮融资期间，Larry 和 Sergey 结识了来自 Netscape 的 Omid Kordestani。

Ben: And the first time they meet, I think Omid is thinking about it in the context of, oh, I’m wearing my Netscape hat. I’ll evaluate. Is there some partnership here? And I think he quickly gets the sense maybe, but Netscape just got bought by AOL. It’s getting a lot less fun here.

Ben：初次见面时，Omid 可能还戴着 Netscape 的帽子在思考：哦，我代表 Netscape，看看有没有合作机会？他很快意识到可能有，但 Netscape 刚被 AOL 收购，这里越来越无趣了。

David: And Omid was the VP of Sales and Business Development at Netscape.

David：Omid 当时是 Netscape 的销售与业务发展副总裁。

Ben: He’s very familiar with building an internet-based business. What these Google guys are doing is very interesting.

Ben：他非常熟悉构建互联网业务，而 Google 这帮人的所作所为十分有趣。

David: Of course, Larry and Sergey, as the great recruiters that they are, like hey, why don’t you come work here? Omid joins Google, essentially as chief revenue officer. He’s tasked with, okay, take this business plan. Take these three areas and make them a reality.

David：当然，身为优秀招聘者的 Larry 和 Sergey 说道：嘿，要不要来我们这儿工作？于是 Omid 加入 Google，基本上担任首席营收官。他的任务是：拿着这份商业计划，把这三大方向变成现实。

We should say too, Omid is an awesome guy. We talked to him in research. He goes out and of course the first innovative business model that they pitch the VCs, number one, the enterprise search business model, he goes out and starts trying to sell it. But as you might imagine, especially at the time, there wasn’t a lot of customer pull, shall we say, for this. For the first six-plus months of the company, the rest of 1999, after the venture funding, things are not looking good on the revenue front.

我们还得说，Omid 是个了不起的人。我们在研究中与他交谈过。他开始着手推进他们向风投推介的第一项创新商业模式——企业搜索业务模式，并尝试销售。但你可以想象，尤其在当时，这并没有太大的客户需求。融资后 1999 年剩下的六个多月里，公司的营收情况并不乐观。

Ben: David, do you remember—this is way back in Acquired history—what Doug Leone told us in February of 2020 when we were recording our episode with him?

Ben：David，你还记得吗——这要追溯到 Acquired 的早期历史——2020 年 2 月我们录制节目时 Doug Leone 告诉我们的那句话？

David: Oh, yes. I know exactly what you’re going to say, and I’ve got some more flavor on that quote. You give the quote.

David：哦，记得。我知道你要说什么，而且我还了解到那句话背后的更多细节。你先说那句话吧。

Ben: The quote is from Sir Michael Maritz. He comes to Doug and they’re running Sequoia Capital together at the time. He says, “Doug, we’ve never paid so much for so little.”

Ben：那句话来自 Sir Michael Moritz。他当时与 Doug 一起管理 Sequoia Capital，他说：“Doug，我们从未花这么多钱买到这么少的东西。”

David: That’s the lore. I got a little more behind-the-scenes flavor on the quote. Apparently, it was not Sir Michael who said it first. He might have just been repeating it back.

David：这成了传说。我了解到这句话的幕后细节。显然，最初说这话的并不是 Sir Michael，他可能只是复述。

Ben: Was it John Doerr?

Ben：是 John Doerr 说的吗？

David: Apparently, it was Vinod in the Kleiner partnership. That’s what I heard. This is the hot potato of quotes. Nobody wants to actually take credit for this. Either way, though, the sentiment is right. You can understand why Kleiner and Sequoia would feel this way. They have egg on their faces.

David：据说是 Kleiner 的合伙人 Vinod 说的。我听到的就是这样。这句话就像烫手山芋，没人想真正认领。但不管怎样，情绪是对的。你可以理解 Kleiner 和 Sequoia 的感受，他们被打了脸。

They just paid \$100 million post for a Series A company with no revenue. The revenue is not materializing. We’re now into the year 2000. The bubble is starting to burst and Google still basically has no business.

他们刚刚以 1 亿美元投后估值投资了一家没有收入的 A 轮公司，而收入却一直没出现。此时已经进入 2000 年，泡沫开始破裂，而 Google 基本上仍然没有业务。

Ben: No business, but growing market share, fervent loving fandom among the people using it, providing real value to people. There’s got to be something here.

Ben：没有业务收入，但市场份额在增长，用户热情且忠诚，为人们提供了真正的价值。这其中一定有什么机会。

David: Exactly. The revenue imperative is becoming, well, more of an imperative, shall we say. And Omid’s a smart guy. He’s like, I’m not going to just keep banging my head against enterprises here. We’re going to pursue the other two business lines that are obvious. Who knows how big they’ll be, but at least we’ll make some money. So set up just regular ads, same way as everybody else does it.

David：没错。盈利的紧迫性正变得愈发迫切。Omid 很聪明，他想：我不能再在企业客户这条路上磕头了。我们得去搞另外两条显而易见的业务线。规模多大不好说，但至少能赚点钱。所以就像其他公司那样，先投放普通广告。

Omid goes and hires Tim Armstrong in New York to set up an ad sales force, and Google does start selling ads at the top of search result pages.

Omid 去纽约聘请 Tim Armstrong 组建广告销售团队，Google 也确实开始在搜索结果页顶部销售广告。

Ben: What do these ads look like, David?

Ben：David，这些广告长什么样？

David: Importantly, Larry and Sergey insisted that, okay, if we have to have ads on here, they need to be text only. We can’t serve images and banner ads like everybody else does because that’ll slow down the page.

David：关键是，Larry 和 Sergey 坚持如果必须投放广告，那就只能是纯文字。我们不能像别人那样用图片或横幅广告，因为那会拖慢页面速度。

Ben: It’s like they always talk about it for taste, which is true, but yes, it’s a performance thing.

Ben：他们总说是出于品味，这没错，但归根结底还是性能问题。

David: It’s a page performance thing. There are these great stories about Tim in New York, Omid, and ad Salesforce that they’re building up at Google. They’re going to ad agencies, they’re going to advertisers directly. They’re trying to sell these ads, and no images, just text. Trust us, it’s going to work.

David：这是页面性能的考量。有很多关于 Tim 在纽约、Omid 以及他们在 Google 搭建广告销售团队的精彩故事。他们拜访广告代理商，也直接找广告主，推销这些只有文字、没有图片的广告。“相信我们，这会奏效。”

Ben: Not very exciting to these Madison Avenue guys. How are they paying for them right now?

Ben：对麦迪逊大道的广告人来说不太刺激。他们现在怎么付费？

David: Still CPM.

David：仍然按 CPM 计费。

Ben: So you buy a keyword and then your promise that you’re going to be an ad that appears on the page whenever that keyword is searched, and you’re going to pay per thousand impressions of that keyword. Is that right?

Ben：也就是说，你购买一个关键词，承诺在用户搜索该关键词时展示你的广告，并按每千次展示付费，对吗？

David: Yes.

David：对。

Ben: Okay. Not self-serve, no web tools for this. This is negotiated over the phone, and then they manually hand enter it into Google. that when this keyword is searched, you need to display a text ad for this person and track how many times you display it because we then need to invoice them for how many times the page loads.

Ben：好的。不是自助投放，也没网络工具支持。全部通过电话协商，然后人工把订单录入 Google 系统——当有人搜索这个关键词时，你要展示文字广告，并记录展示次数，以便据此开具账单。

David: Yes. Not even on the phone. That would be really technologically advanced for Madison Avenue at the time. All ad insertions were done by fax at this time. Google had to install fax machines at its headquarters to take these insertion orders for these ads that they were selling.

David：对。甚至不是电话——对当时的麦迪逊大道来说，那已算高科技。所有广告投放指令都是通过传真完成的。Google 不得不在总部装传真机来接收这些广告订单。

Ben: Awesome.

Ben：太酷了。

David: Now what was the pitch, though, to Madison Avenue about why this would work?

David：那么 Google 向麦迪逊大道推销这套方案时，是怎么说明它会奏效的？

Ben: Intent, baby.

Ben：用户意图，伙计。

David: Exactly. The very first project that Jeff Dean did when he came over from DEC is Larry, Sergey, and Urs told him, the VCs say we got to sell ads. Go figure out the tech to serve ads on google.com. But don’t do anything to degrade search or user experience.

David：没错。Jeff Dean 从 DEC 加入后做的第一个项目，是 Larry、Sergey 和 Urs 告诉他：风投要求我们开始卖广告，去想办法在 google.com 上投放广告，但绝不能影响搜索和用户体验。

Jeff works with Marissa Mayer who just joined from Stanford, undergrad, and they’re like, okay, fine. This is going to have to just be text. What can we do as a test to see if we can engineer something that’ll work with text ads? We could scale, run it against a bunch of queries. Well, what about Amazon affiliate links?

Jeff 与刚从斯坦福毕业并入职的 Marissa Mayer 合作，他们想，好吧，只能做纯文字广告。我们能做什么测试来验证文字广告的可行性？可以做可扩展的实验，跑在一堆查询上。嗯，试试 Amazon 联盟链接怎么样？

Ben: We know a guy at Amazon.

Ben：我们在 Amazon 认识个人。

David: We know a guy at Amazon who happens to own a good chunk of this company. Google goes and signs up as an Amazon affiliate.

David：我们在 Amazon 的那位朋友正好持有谷歌不少股份。于是 Google 注册成为 Amazon 联盟伙伴。

Ben: Which, how crazy is this? The Google business model was validated, doing customer development, a startup idea validation using Amazon affiliates as the mechanism.

Ben：这事儿多疯狂！Google 用 Amazon 联盟这种机制做客户开发，验证了自己的商业模式，好比一家初创公司做创意验证。

David: Jeff Dean codes it up so that dynamically as users are searching, if there’s a query that is related at all to any book in the Amazon library catalog, Google will dynamically generate a text ad saying, go buy this book at Amazon, insert an Amazon affiliate link, and drive traffic over to Amazon.

David：Jeff Dean 编写代码，实现动态逻辑：当用户搜索的查询与 Amazon 书目中的任何图书相关时，Google 会即时生成一条文本广告，提示“去 Amazon 购买此书”，并插入 Amazon 联盟链接，将流量导向 Amazon。

The amazing thing is, of course it actually works. Now, whatever the Amazon affiliate commission, if it’s 4% or 5% of the revenue of a $10 book, obviously is not going to change Google’s fortune in the amount of money that they’ll generate from this.

令人惊讶的是，这招真的奏效。当然，Amazon 联盟佣金无论是 4% 还是 5%，一本 10 美元的书也赚不了 Google 多少钱，并不足以改变公司的财务命运。

Ben: But it’s a test.

Ben：但这只是一次测试。

David: It’s a test and it’s proof that they can then take to advertisers. We can capture intent and we can send highly monetizing traffic to you based on the keywords that you are buying.

David：这是一项测试，也是可向广告主展示的证据：我们能够捕捉用户意图，并根据你购买的关键词为你输送高价值流量。

Ben: If you think about the funnel steps, there’s the impression of an ad, hey, they saw the ad. Then two, there’s the click, they click through the page. Then three, there’s the on-page conversion. It would be one thing to just test click-through rate, which would’ve shown a great result here, because click-through rates on search ads are higher than ads that are just randomly around the Internet. Someone is intending to buy something, they have high intent. That’s a great place to show an ad. The click through rate’s going to be higher.

Ben：如果你考虑广告漏斗步骤，首先是展示——用户看到了广告；其次是点击——用户点击进入页面；第三是页面上的转化。仅测试点击率已足够说明问题，因为搜索广告的点击率本就高于随机互联网广告。用户本身有购买意图，意图强烈，这是展示广告的最佳场合，点击率自然更高。

真正找到路径的是Jeff Dean。

They can say this intent-based ad system has high click-through rate and high conversion. Yeah, they’re just text ads, but you’re going to like the numbers. This is ultimately a math problem.

他们可以说，这套基于意图的广告系统既有高点击率又有高转化率。没错，只是文字广告，但你一定会喜欢这些数据。归根结底，这是一道数学题。

David: It was an absolutely brilliant test and bootstrap of the first step of the Google ad model.

David：这确实是一项绝妙的测试，也为 Google 广告模式的第一步奠定了基础。

So that’s gen one of the Google ads business. They get it set up, it’s going, it’s making some money. They’re winning some clients on Madison Avenue. Good. Great.

这就是 Google 广告业务的第一代模型。他们搭建起来，运转起来，开始赚点钱，也在麦迪逊大道赢得了一些客户。不错，很好。

The more interesting piece for the next year, year-and-a-half, is the OEM search portal deals. There are some big deals to come—Netscape, Yahoo, AOL.

接下来一年到一年半里更有趣的，是 OEM 搜索门户的合作协议。有几笔大单即将到来——Netscape、Yahoo、AOL 等。

Ben: This is white-labeling Google search to be the search powering other places, search activity that has tons of traffic.

Ben：这就是对 Google 搜索进行白标处理，让其为流量巨大的其他平台提供搜索功能。

David: Which, oh by the way, is also going to train huge portions of the Internet to use Google search.

David：顺便说一句，这也会让互联网上的大量用户习惯使用 Google 搜索。

Ben: Yes it is. Specifically, what were the portal deals at this period of time before Google had a real functioning paid search business? What a portal deal represented was just letting a portal use Google search to power their organic search and in exchange just getting paid a fee for that.

Ben：确实如此。在 Google 还没有真正运转中的付费搜索业务时，当时的门户合作究竟是什么？门户合作的含义就是让门户使用 Google 搜索来驱动他们的自然搜索，并因此获得一笔费用。

David: It was the Inktomi business model. It was exactly that. We’re selling our search results for you to use on a third-party page.

David：这就是 Inktomi 的商业模式，完全一样。我们把搜索结果卖给你，用在第三方页面上。

Ben: And it’s effectively a B2B supplier. They’re a vendor to a portal more or less.

Ben：本质上就是 B2B 供应商，他们在某种程度上是门户的供货方。

David: It turns out, though, that we’re still in the era of the Internet where portals are pretty big.

David：然而事实证明，我们仍处于门户网站非常庞大的互联网时代。

Ben: Ton of traffic. And they’re not just any old vendor. They’re a vendor that at the bottom of every page says Powered by Google.

Ben：流量非常大。而且他们并非普通供应商——他们的每个页面底部都会标注“Powered by Google”。

David: Yes. So pretty quickly after Omid joins from Netscape back in 1999, he goes back to his old colleagues at Netscape/AOL and gets essentially a proof of concept deal done with them. That’s for Google to backfill organic search results on Netscape own directory service that they just launched to compete with Yahoo.

David：没错。1999 年 Omid 从 Netscape 加入后不久，他便回到 Netscape/AOL 的老同事那里，敲定了一份概念验证协议：由 Google 为 Netscape 新推出、用来与 Yahoo 竞争的目录服务填充自然搜索结果。

Ben: It’s interesting. We always think about Netscape the browser, but this was presumably the Netscape homepage. Whenever you opened up, it would go to netscape.com or something, and there’d be all these Netscape services there available and one of which was search.

Ben：很有意思。我们总把 Netscape 当作浏览器，但这里说的应该是 Netscape 的主页。每次打开浏览器，它会跳到 netscape.com 之类的网站，上面有各种 Netscape 服务，其中就包括搜索。

David: Yup. I presume having been acquired by AOL, this was now more of a strategic priority for Netscape, because this is AOL’s whole business model at this point besides the monthly dial-up fees.

David：是的。我想在被 AOL 收购后，这对 Netscape 来说成了更高的战略优先级，因为在当时，除了每月拨号费外，这几乎就是 AOL 的全部商业模式。

Ben: Worth remembering, AOL way, way bigger. At this point, tens of millions of people using AOL, way fewer going through netscape.com to deliver traffic to this Google search. This is the small part of the organization they’re working with right now.

Ben：别忘了，AOL 要大得多。那时有数千万用户使用 AOL，而通过 netscape.com 把流量导向 Google 搜索的人少得多。他们当前合作的只是 AOL 体系中很小的一部分。

David: Exactly, but relative to how small Google actually is at this point in time, it’s still big enough that when they flip the switch and Google on Netscape goes live with Google powering the organic search results, there’s so much traffic that it blows out Google’s infrastructure.

David：没错，但相对当时的 Google 实际规模而言，这流量依旧巨大——当他们切换上线，由 Google 驱动 Netscape 的自然搜索结果时，流量之大几乎压垮了 Google 的基础设施。

Ben: Well, it comes close. Basically, they’re watching the analytics like a Hawk. Omid gets an urgent call from Sergey saying the traffic is about to tip over. This is potentially company-killing because this is their big, strategic priority. If they prove that they’re untrustworthy to Netscape and can’t deliver, then how are they going to keep Netscape business, let alone get any other portal deals?

Ben：确实差点崩溃。他们像鹰一样紧盯分析数据。Sergey 给 Omid 打来紧急电话，说流量快要溢出了。这可能要了公司的命，因为这是他们最大的战略重点。如果他们向 Netscape 证明自己不可靠、无法交付，那别说留住 Netscape 的业务了，其他门户合作更是无从谈起。

David: Or be able to go sell to enterprises that they’re thinking they’re going to do at this point in time.

David：更别提他们当时还打算向企业客户销售服务。

Ben: So they cannot tip over. They have this pretty tough decision to make, but actually it’s not even a decision at all. This is obvious. We are shutting off google.com for today and we are going to prioritize all traffic from Netscape for our servers until we can stand up more machines.

Ben：所以他们绝不能宕机。他们面临一个艰难的抉择，但其实这根本算不上抉择，答案显而易见：今天关闭 google.com，把服务器的全部流量优先分配给 Netscape，直到我们能再装更多机器为止。

David: Just think about this for a minute. Think about everything that Google is today—never goes down, universally available basically everywhere in the world on every device. It’s fricking Google. In 1999, they shut Google down so that they could serve Netscape’s users.

David：先停下来想一想，看看今天的 Google——永不宕机，几乎在全球所有设备上都能访问。这可是 Google！然而在 1999 年，他们竟然为了给 Netscape 用户提供服务而把 Google 关停了一天。

Ben: Yes. Look, the revenue is very material coming from this, and the reputational impact is very material. Like I said, it sounds like a hard decision. It’s actually not a decision at all.

Ben：是啊。要知道，这笔收入非常可观，声誉影响也极其重大。正如我说的，这听起来像是艰难选择，其实根本不需要选择。

David: It also ends up being the right strategic decision because of what you mentioned a minute ago of the Powered by Google logo at the bottom. Sure you shut off google.com for a day and your own Google users of course don’t like that. But you’re training millions of new Google users who are going to see Powered by Google at the bottom.

David：事实证明，这也是正确的战略选择，因为正如你刚才提到的页面底部那句 “Powered by Google”。是的，你把 google.com 关一天，自家用户肯定不爽，但你却在培训数以百万计的新用户——他们都会看到底部那行 “Powered by Google”。

Ben: And they got trained. The Netscape deal brought in 3 million total searchers per day. At first, Google’s sitting there begging these early portals, hey please put Powered by Google on, really trying to get that inserted in the deal.

Ben：而且这种培训效果显著。Netscape 这笔合作每天带来 300 万搜索用户。最开始，Google 还得央求这些早期门户，“拜托把 Powered by Google 加上”，拼命想把这句话写进合同里。

Later on, Google got so well-known for having quality, fast search results on a big index, that it was a value proposition to show your users, oh, our search is Powered by Google.

后来，Google 以高质量、极速且索引庞大的搜索闻名，这反而成了门户向用户炫耀的卖点：“看，我们的搜索由 Google 提供！”

David: It becomes the ‘Intel Inside’ of search. Yes. It’s the ingredient brand.

David：它成了搜索领域的“Intel Inside”——没错，就是核心成分品牌。

Ben: That’s exactly right. Now, they’ve got some distribution, millions of users, but still very little revenue in June, 2000.

Ben：完全正确。此时他们已经拥有一定的分发渠道、数百万用户，但到了 2000 年 6 月，收入仍然寥寥。

David: So over the next year or so, obviously they’re working on the other business models too, but Omid keeps signing up some smaller portals, some international portals on the success of the Netscape deal, getting more of these OEM portal deals for Google. Then, they start working on the big kahuna—Yahoo.

David：接下来一年左右，他们当然也在推进其他商业模式；借着 Netscape 的成功，Omid 不断签下更多小型门户、国际门户，为 Google 获取更多 OEM 合作。随后，他们开始瞄准“大鱼”——Yahoo。

Ben: Yes. But before we tell that story, now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies, Statsig. David, it’s funny. In a way, Google was the first modern software company in the way we think about them today, with super cushy campuses, an engineering-first culture, 20 % time, which was copied by fast-growing startups who wanted to be like Google.

Ben：没错。但在讲 Yahoo 的故事之前，我们要感谢我们最喜欢的公司之一——Statsig。David，这很有意思。从某种意义上说，Google 是我们今天所理解的首家现代软件公司：舒适的园区、工程师至上的文化、“20% 时间”——这些后来都被高速成长的创业公司效仿。

David: Google also pioneered something else we take for granted, though, which is great data tools for product and engineering teams. Google was really the first company to make analytics dashboards, A/B testing, feature controls, and other tools accessible across thousands of engineers and data scientists that they’d ultimately scale to—these tools enabled a fast-moving bottoms-up approach to product development.

David：不过 Google 还开创了一件如今被视为理所当然的事——为产品和工程团队提供出色的数据工具。Google 是第一家让数千名工程师和数据科学家都能使用分析仪表盘、A/B 测试、功能开关等工具的公司，这些工具最终支持了快速迭代、自下而上的产品开发模式。

Ben: So just like Google’s office and culture, this practice also became the norm for future tech companies. For the past 15 years or so, every major tech company has had entire teams of people rebuilding this stack of tools internally for themselves.

Ben：就像 Google 的办公室和文化一样，这种实践也成了后来科技公司的标配。过去大约 15 年里，几乎所有大型科技公司都有整支团队在内部重造这套工具栈。

David: But something interesting is happening with the latest generation of tech giants. Rather than building these tools themselves, companies like OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Brex, Notion, Anthropic, they’re just using Statsig.

David：但在最新一代科技巨头身上出现了有趣的变化：他们不再自建这些工具，而是直接使用 Statsig，比如 OpenAI、Figma、Atlassian、Brex、Notion、Anthropic 等公司。

Ben: Statsig has rebuilt this entire suite of data tools that was available at just 10 or 15 big giant companies as a standalone company itself. This is experimentation with proper statistical analysis, feature flags for safe deployments, session replays, analytics, and more, all backed by a single set of product data.

Ben：Statsig 将原本只有十来家大公司才有的整套数据工具重建成一家独立公司：从严谨统计的实验平台、保障安全发布的功能开关，到会话回放、分析工具等，全都基于同一套产品数据。

David: And using Statsig is not just about saving engineering time. It’s about getting world-class infrastructure from day one. Rather than arguing about metric definitions or troubleshooting broken tools, your team can just focus on building a great product. Since they process an enormous amount of data as Statsig does trillions of events per day, they also scale with you.

David：使用 Statsig 不仅仅是为了节省工程时间，更是为了从第一天起就获得世界级基础设施。与其在指标定义上争论不休、排查损坏的工具，你的团队可以专注于打造卓越产品。Statsig 每天处理万亿级事件的数据量，能够随着你的业务同步扩展。

Ben: And if you already have your own set of product data, they make it easy to extend into their tools. Statsig is warehouse-native, so they can plug directly into your existing product data, whether it’s in Snowflake, BigQuery, whatever.

Ben：如果你已有完整的产品数据集，他们也能轻松将其接入自家工具。Statsig 天生支持数据仓库，可直接连接 Snowflake、BigQuery 等现有产品数据。

David: If you’re interested in giving your product team access to incredible data tools, go to statsig.com/acquired. They have a generous free tier with a \$50,000 startup program, and affordable enterprise plans. That’s statsig.com/acquired. Just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

David：若想为产品团队配备卓越的数据工具，请访问 statsig.com/acquired。Statsig 提供慷慨的免费套餐、50,000 美元的初创企业计划，以及价格亲民的企业方案。记得告诉他们是 Ben 和 David 推荐的。

Ben: All right, David. How did Google get big?

Ben：好的，David，Google 是如何做大的？

David: In June of 2000. They sign a deal with Yahoo right as the whole world is falling apart. The dot-com bubble is bursting. The peak of the NASDAQ was March 2000. In June of 2000, Google signs the deal with Yahoo, that they are going to take over all organic search result backfills on yahoo.com, with the Powered by Google branding. And Yahoo is going to invest \$10 million in Google as part of this deal.

David：2000 年 6 月，在互联网泡沫破裂、世界动荡之际，Google 与 Yahoo 达成协议。纳斯达克在 2000 年 3 月见顶。2000 年 6 月，Google 签约 Yahoo，接管 yahoo.com 全部自然搜索结果回填，并加注 Powered by Google 标识；作为协议的一部分，Yahoo 还向 Google 投资 1,000 万美元。

Ben: What a deal.

Ben：这真是一笔了不起的交易。

David: This totally saves Google. Between the revenue that they got from Yahoo for this and the \$10 million investment, it keeps the company going through the next couple of years of the dot-com winter until they figure out the AdWords business model.

David：这笔交易彻底拯救了 Google。来自 Yahoo 的收入加上 1,000 万美元投资，让公司在随后的互联网寒冬中存活下来，直到他们找到了 AdWords 的商业模式。

Ben: So traffic doubled to 14 million searchers per day on day one of this deal. June of 2000 we’re now a year later than the Netscape deal. So started to get a material portion of web traffic here with 14 million searchers per day.

Ben：协议首日，搜索量翻倍，日搜索用户达到 1,400 万。2000 年 6 月距 Netscape 合作已过去一年，Google 由此获得了可观的网络流量——每天 1,400 万搜索用户。

David: And the next year in 2001, the first full year of this Yahoo portal search deal, Yahoo pays Google \$7.2 million for organic search results. It’s material. Again to underscore between the \$10 million investment, this revenue, the other portal deals, Netscape, others, and then others that they’re able to get on the back of Yahoo. This revenue really bridges the company through the dot-com winter.

David：到 2001 年，也就是 Yahoo 门户搜索合作的第一个完整年度，Yahoo 为自然搜索结果向 Google 支付了 720 万美元。这是一笔实实在在的收入。再加上 1,000 万美元投资、这笔收入、与 Netscape 等门户的合作，以及借助 Yahoo 所签下的其他门户协议，这些收益真正帮助 Google 度过了互联网寒冬。

Ben: That’s such a good point, and something that’s often pretty overlooked. There was no potential for Google to raise more money here. The venture capital gravy train was over. We’re sitting here saying, oh, they really need to make money. When are they going to turn the revenue switch on? And we’re like hand ringing over here. We’re only two years into the company’s life. Think about startups today. You don’t have…

Ben：这真是个很好的观点，却常被忽视。当时 Google 已不可能再融资，风险投资的盛宴已告终结。我们在这儿担心他们必须赚钱、何时开启营收开关，焦虑不已，可公司才成立两年。想想今天的初创企业，你可没有……

David: Expectations of profitability.

David：盈利预期。

Ben: Exactly, within a couple of years of founding. But Google’s got a very expensive business to run between the people and the infrastructure, and there’s no more ability to finance it. So revenue really was the only option.

Ben：没错，公司成立短短几年内就面临这个问题。但 Google 的运营成本非常高，无论是人员还是基础设施，都需要巨额资金，而公司已无法再融资，因此唯有靠收入来维持运转。

David: In the midst of all of this, as Yahoo’s coming online, the board is also pushing Larry and Sergey to hire a CEO. As part of the Series A process, John Doerr had very begrudgingly extracted a promise from Larry and Sergey to hire a “professional CEO.” Larry was CEO for the Series A and CEO for the next couple of years after the Series A. They really didn’t want to do it. They were dragging their feet.

David：在这一切发生的同时，Yahoo 正与 Google 合作上线，董事会也在催促 Larry 和 Sergey 物色 CEO。作为 A 轮融资的条件之一，John Doerr 勉强从两人那里得到承诺，要聘请一位“职业 CEO”。A 轮融资时 Larry 任 CEO，此后又担任了两年多，但他们始终不情愿，一直拖延。

Ben: It took 16 months to find a CEO. I don’t think that was entirely because it was hard to find someone. I think some of that was let’s see how long we can get away without one.

Ben：他们整整花了 16 个月才找到 CEO。我认为并不完全是因为难找人才，更像是想看看没有 CEO 能撑多久。

David: My favorite story from the whole Google CEO hiring process was the standard playbook here that John, Mike, Sequoia, and Kleiner would run with founders when convincing them to hire a CEO. Take them around the valley, take them on the tour, have them meet the CEOs of the great companies in the Valley at the public companies and say, look, see what a great CEO can do for your business?

David：关于 Google 寻找 CEO 的过程，我最喜欢的故事是 John、Mike 以及 Sequoia、Kleiner 说服创始人聘请 CEO 的标准套路：带创始人走遍硅谷，拜访各大上市公司的优秀 CEO，让他们亲眼看看“好 CEO 能为企业做些什么”。

They do this with Larry and Sergey. They go around, they meet everybody in the valley, they’re unimpressed. They don’t like any of them. Finally after months of this, they come back and they tell Kleiner and Sequoia, there’s one person that we met in this whole process who we think meets our bar, who we would be willing to come in and hire as our CEO here at Google.

他们照样带着 Larry 和 Sergey 四处见人，但两位创始人对所有候选人都不满意。数月之后，他们回到 Kleiner 和 Sequoia 面前说：在整个过程中只有一个人符合我们的标准，我们愿意请他来当 Google 的 CEO。

Ben: Oh, God. Who is it?

Ben：天哪，是谁？

David: Steve Jobs.

David：史蒂夫·乔布斯。

Ben: Really?

Ben：真的吗？

David: Yes.

David：真的。

Ben: Because wasn’t he an idol of theirs?

Ben：他不是一直是他们的偶像吗？

David: Yeah. Well and he had just come back to Apple from NeXT. Whether they really meant it or not, I’m sure if Steve had been willing to come be CEO, they probably would’ve said yes. But I think it was more like a hey, a little thumbing their nose at the VCs. I’m like, nah. We’re keeping our bar high. It’s Steve Jobs or nothing. So great. Also, deeply ironic given what was to come between Apple and Google.

David：没错。当时乔布斯刚从 NeXT 回归 Apple。不管他们是不是当真，如果乔布斯愿意来当 CEO，他们大概率会答应。但这更像是在对风险投资人表示：我们只接受最顶级人选——要么乔布斯，要么就算了。讽刺的是，之后 Apple 和 Google 的关系走向却大有玄机。

Ben: Ten years later, yup.

Ben：十年后，确实如此。

David: But that is for the next episode. Anyway, it was a pretty contentious process. Through all of it, 16, 17, 18 months in, finally Eric Schmidt emerges as probably the only viable candidate out there. I think Eric was acceptable to both sides. Both because he was an actual engineer and had been at Sun. He was CEO of Novell. He was a business person too. He’d been a CEO, been a CEO of a public company. Famously, he hit the Venn diagram of everything. He also went to Burning Man as did Larry and Sergey.

David：这留待下一集再说。总之，整个过程颇为曲折。经历了 16、17、18 个月后，最终 Eric Schmidt 脱颖而出，几乎成了唯一合适的候选人。他既是工程师，曾效力 Sun，又当过 Novell 的 CEO，也有商业运营经验，担任过上市公司 CEO，可谓“全能型”人才；而且他也像 Larry 和 Sergey 一样参加过 Burning Man。

Ben: Right.

Ben：是的。

David: And so Eric joins in March of 2001. Again, I think Larry and Sergey were still resentful of the process. I think it did come to work pretty well. They, and Larry especially realized, hey, there are parts of being a CEO, especially as we’re getting bigger that I don’t really like. Eric can do those things. I don’t really want to run a finance org. I can have Eric do those things. It ended up working really well at a critical moment for the company where they needed revenue, they needed to build a business, and they needed to scale.

David：于是 Eric 在 2001 年 3 月加入。说实话，我认为 Larry 和 Sergey 仍对整个流程心存怨气。但最终效果相当不错。他们——尤其是 Larry——意识到，随着公司做大，担任 CEO 的一些职责并不是自己喜欢的，Eric 可以接手那些事情。我并不想管财务部门，让 Eric 去做就行。事实证明，在公司急需营收、需要建立业务并实现扩张的关键时刻，这样的安排非常奏效。

Ben: Yeah, and the three of them ran the company together. I think they had a daily standing meeting. It wasn’t like there was a CEO that took over and put the founders out to pasture. It was CEO, then Larry was president of products and Sergey was president of technology. But really it was like there are three people running this company together.

Ben：是的，他们三人共同管理公司。我记得他们每天都有一个站会。并不是说 CEO 接管后把创始人晾到一旁，而是 Eric 当 CEO，Larry 担任产品总裁，Sergey 担任技术总裁，本质上是三个人一起运营公司。

David: And a trusted relationship between three people is just more manpower than two people.

David：三人之间建立的信任关系，比两个人合作能发挥更大的合力。

Ben: We haven’t talked about googliness yet. It was so uniquely googly that there would’ve been organ rejection if Eric tried to take a heavier hand. He really came in with a lens toward learning and understanding.

Ben：我们还没谈“Googliness”。Google 的文化如此独特，如果 Eric 试图强势介入，肯定会被“排异”。他是在学习和理解的心态下加入的。

There was somebody who decided very early in his tenure, maybe even on his first day, to move into his office with him because there wasn’t enough space anywhere else, so he was camped out…

有人在他上任的早期——或许就是第一天——决定搬进他的办公室，因为其他地方没有空位，于是他就这样“扎营”在那儿……

David: Like an engineer at Google.

David：就像 Google 的工程师一样。

Ben: He had an office mate for many months with an engineer. It’s this googliness.

Ben：他和一位工程师同办公室好几个月。这就是 Googliness。

David: It was a little bit of an acid test for him.

David：这对他来说算是一种“酸性测试”。

Ben: Yeah, but this giant worldview, let’s solve big problems together, can we think bigger no matter how crazy the solution, if it sounds like a good idea, it’s worth running down, googliness is kind of utopian in a way that makes all other companies look almost like an evil empire. It feels like a university in a lot of ways.

Ben：是的，这种宏大的世界观提倡“让我们一起解决大问题”，不管方案多么离奇，只要听起来是好主意就值得去追求。Googliness 带有一种乌托邦色彩，让其他公司看上去几乎像“邪恶帝国”。在很多方面，它更像一所大学。

David: That was the culture there.

David：那就是当时的文化。

Ben: And they wanted the mentality of a campus, too, where they want inexperienced people who don’t know what they don’t know. They try novel approaches to problems. They collaborate more than they otherwise would’ve.

Ben：他们也想营造校园式心态，吸引那些不知道自己“无知”的新人，用新颖方法解决问题，比通常情况下更乐于合作。

David: But who are really high horsepower.

David：而这些人都具备超强的能力。

Ben: Everyone there was ludicrously high IQ from the very beginning. But I think that collaborative utopian thing went along with the IQ.

Ben：从一开始那里的每个人都聪明得惊人，但我认为这种协作式的乌托邦精神与高智商是相辅相成的。

David: The phrase that I heard a lot in the research from talking to folks who are early Google was a healthy disregard for the impossible. It was the modus operandi there.

David：在研究过程中与早期 Google 员工交谈时，我经常听到一句话：对“不可能”的健康漠视——这正是他们的行事方式。

Ben: And it’s this culture that comes up with a mission statement to organize the world’s information and make it uniVercelly accessible and useful. This was in 1999 in their very first press release after the financing, that has been the mission statement.

Ben：正是这种文化催生了“整理全球信息，使其普遍可及并发挥价值”这句使命宣言。1999 年，在融资后的首次新闻稿中，这便已成为 Google 的使命。

David: It’s also amazing how much that mission statement scaled.

David：同样令人惊叹的是，这条使命宣言的可扩展性之强。

Ben: I was going to save this for way later in analysis, but organize the world’s information. Not too broad, not too narrow, in many ways altruistic to attract the right type of talent that you want, but also one that lends itself to tremendous monetization. If you’re going to organize the world’s information and you have a bunch of smart people, you are going to be able to create a money printing machine based on organizing the world’s information.

Ben：本想稍后再分析，但“整理全球信息”既不太宽泛也不太狭窄，既带有一定的利他色彩以吸引合适人才，又天然具备巨大的变现潜力。如果你要整理全球信息，又拥有一群聪明人，你就能凭此打造出印钞机般的商业模式。

They actually have a great quote in their IPO prospectus. “We believe that the most effective and ultimately the most profitable way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first.” (a) There’s this almost a trifecta of wonderfully-altruistic sounding mission, that (b) lends itself to this incredible monetization model, (c) as long as we’re putting the needs of our users first.

他们在招股说明书中有一句妙语：“我们相信，实现使命最有效、最终也最有利可图的方式，就是把用户需求放在首位。”(a) 这几乎形成了一个听起来极具利他色彩的使命“铁三角”，(b) 同时孕育出惊人的变现模式，(c) 前提是始终将用户需求置于首位。

David: And I think Eric really bought into this because it was a risk. Even though he joined Google in 2001 and a lot of these portal deals were already underway, the Yahoo portal deal had already happened, it wasn’t clear that Google was going to be a smash hit home run. I think it was clear that it was going to survive, and they had enough revenue and they could be profitable. But we’re talking about somebody who’s the CEO of a public company,

David：我想 Eric 真正认可了这一点，因为这是一场冒险。尽管他在 2001 年加入时，多项门户合作已在进行，Yahoo 的协议也已落定，但 Google 能否大获成功仍未可知。可以肯定的是公司能活下来，也有足够收入实现盈利。但别忘了，他之前可是上市公司的 CEO，

Ben: Novell.

Ben：Novell。

David: And taking a risk to come back to a private company, that yes, had a lot of usage, but hey, startups are out of favor now. I think it was really him making a bet, too, of no, this is what I want and I’m going to buy into this.

David：如今却冒险回到一家私企，虽说使用量很大，但彼时创业公司并不受青睐。我觉得他也是在押注：没错，这就是我想要的，我要投入其中。

Ben: Totally agree.

Ben：完全同意。

David: What was Eric walking into here with Google and call it spring of 2001? We’re now through getting the Yahoo portal deal done. Basically stabilize the ship, save the company. Google’s going to survive the dot-com crash between the \$10 million investment from Yahoo, plus the revenue from that portal deal.

David：那么 2001 年春，Eric 走进的是怎样的 Google？Yahoo 合作已落实，基本上稳住了船、救了公司。有 Yahoo 的 1,000 万美元投资，加上门户协议收入，Google 将在互联网泡沫破裂中存活下来。

Eric hasn’t started yet, but Larry and Sergey now turn their attention back to ads. And they’re really not happy. The current state of play with ads, even though it’s working to a certain extent and advertisers are happy, there are a bunch of problems with it.

Eric 还未正式上任，但 Larry 和 Sergey 已重新关注广告业务，他们并不满意。虽然广告在一定程度上奏效，广告主也挺高兴，但仍有一堆问题。

One, it’s all still hands sold on Madison Avenue. The market of the pool of potential advertisers is nowhere near as big as the pool of potential searchers and intent that’s happening on Google.

首先，广告仍然完全依赖麦迪逊大道那套人工销售方式。潜在广告主的市场规模远不及 Google 上庞大的搜索用户及他们的意图池。

Ben: They can’t really scale this business. It would require getting an enormous amount of spend from each of the small number of customers they already have.

Ben：他们实际上无法扩大这项业务规模。要做到这一点，就必须让现有少量客户中的每一家都大幅提高广告支出。

David: Then scale two, another reason it’s not going to scale well, is that it’s all sold by hand. As you scale the business and you scale the number of advertisers you’re going to need to scale, the number of people you need to sell by hand. That sucks. Then you end up looking just like Yahoo. That’s on the scaling side.

David：其次，之所以难以扩张，还因为整个广告销售都是靠人工完成的。业务规模越大、广告主数量越多，你就需要更多人手去一一线下销售。那太糟糕了，最终你会变得和 Yahoo 没两样。这就是扩张层面的困境。

Then on the the user experience side, there’s no notion of ad quality here. Google as a value proposition to its users is, we give you the highest quality, most efficient, best search results possible. We help your needs the best. The ads aren’t really lining up with that. There’s no way to ensure that they’re good.

在用户体验层面，目前也不存在广告质量的概念。Google 向用户提供的价值主张是：我们为你呈现最高质量、最高效率、最优搜索结果，最大程度满足你的需求。而这些广告却并不匹配这种定位，也没有办法保证它们的质量。

Ben: They may or may not, yes.

Ben：它们好可能匹配，也可能不匹配，是的。

David: Exactly, so that’s a problem. Then four, Google’s just flat out leaving money on the table. They’re giving advertisers this great product of, hey, we have intent of people searching for these keywords, but Google’s just getting paid on a straight CPM basis for what they’re selling. They’re not not participating in the economic value.

David：没错，所以这是个问题。第四点是，Google 白白把钱留在了桌面上。他们向广告主提供了这样优质的产品：我们掌握用户搜索这些关键词的强烈意图，但 Google 卖的却还是单纯按 CPM 计费，并未真正参与到全部经济价值的分配中。

Ben: And they’re pricing a little bit finger in the air on what the price any given keyword should be.

Ben：而且他们给关键词定价多少有些凭感觉，缺乏依据。

David: Exactly. Now in fall of 2000, they’re like, okay, let’s address this.

David：没错。所以到了 2000 年秋天，他们决定，好，我们得解决这些问题。

Ben: All four of those issues are things that Google’s going to address in this next evolution of AdWords. But there’s a whole part of the world that heavily inspired Adwords v2.

Ben：接下来 AdWords 的迭代将解决这四大问题。但实际上，AdWords v2 受到了行业里另一股力量的深刻启发。

David: AdWords v2 you might say is Google’s Instagram stories moment.

David：可以说，AdWords v2 就像 Google 的 “Instagram Stories 时刻”。

Ben: There was an innovator in the space called Overture, or it’s original name, GoTo.com. We should tell you that story now. So GoTo. Bill Gross started the company out of his startup incubator Idealab, and he did it with quite a bit of flare coming to the world from the TED Conference in February of 1998.

Ben：当时有一家创新公司，名叫 Overture，最初叫 GoTo.com。我们现在应该讲讲它的故事。GoTo 由 Bill Gross 在他的创业孵化器 Idealab 中创立，并于 1998 年 2 月在 TED 大会上高调亮相。

David: So same time as Google’s about to launch.

David：也就是 Google 准备正式上线的同一时期。

Ben: Right. At the time, existing search engines, as you’ll remember, had a problem. This is the same exact problem that Larry and Sergey recognized. Quality was going down.

Ben：对。当时你可能还记得，现有的搜索引擎有一个问题。Larry 和 Sergey 也察觉到了同样的问题——结果质量正在下降。

In the old world, keyword matching algorithms were fine. There was no one gaming the algorithms. There wasn’t a lot of real commercial activity yet. Search engines weren’t well understood yet. So the old hey, go search for dogs and the most relevant website is probably the one that says dogs the most. That still worked.

在早期，关键词匹配算法运作良好，没人刻意操纵算法，也没有多少真正的商业活动，大家对搜索引擎还不够熟悉。所以过去那种“搜索 dog，出现 dog 次数最多的网站往往最相关”的逻辑仍然奏效。

Now you’re starting to get in 1998, all this stuff like keyword stuffing, white text on a white background, people getting porn insights to appear in search results no matter what you’re searching for, hijacking traffic, all that stuff.

到了 1998 年，开始出现关键词堆砌、白底白字、无论你搜什么都把色情内容挤进结果、流量劫持等种种乱象。

Bill had this very radical idea, the best search results should be determined by the free market with dollars. Whoever is willing to pay the most is probably the very best search result for your given query.

Bill 提出了一个非常激进的观点：最佳搜索结果应该让自由市场用金钱来决定，谁愿意出最高价，谁大概率就是该查询的最佳结果。

Spammers who aren’t relevant to your search, can’t afford to pay because there’s not going to be super high conversion. But super legitimate businesses that would actually solve the pain point that you’re searching for could. Just like how Yellow Pages in the phone book had paid inclusion as a philosophy that would lead to only the most relevant listings for any given category.

与搜索无关的垃圾站无法承担高额付费，因为转化率不高；而真正能解决你痛点的正规企业却愿意出价。就像电话簿里的黄页通过付费刊登，以确保每个分类只保留最相关的商家。

David: And at the time, this was a completely crazy idea, but when you think about it, it actually does make sense. If I have a product or service that can solve the need you’re expressing for through your intent in the search, I should be willing to pay more than anybody else to meet your needs.

David：当时这听上去简直疯了，但仔细一想却很有道理。如果我有一款产品或服务能满足你在搜索中表达的需求，我理应愿意出比任何人都高的价来满足你。

Ben: Absolutely. It’s just a different way of solving, ranking, and relevance than Larry did. Larry and Sergey figured it out on the organic side and Bill figured it out on the paid side. Bill went so far as GoTo didn’t actually develop any organic search technology on their own. They relied—

Ben：完全同意。这只是与 Larry 的方法不同的排序与相关性解决方案。Larry 和 Sergey 在自然搜索端找到了答案，Bill 则在付费端找到了答案。Bill 甚至让 GoTo 完全不自行开发自然搜索技术，他们依赖——

David: It was all paid.

David：全都是付费的。

Ben: Yes. Only on paid listings. And if you kept scrolling, they actually did show organic results, but they would license them from Inktomi and others, David, like you were saying as a backfill.

Ben：是的，只展示付费列表。如果你继续往下滚，他们确实会显示自然结果，但那些是从 Inktomi 等公司授权来的，用作回填，正如你刚才说的那样。

The net of all this on the TED stage. Bill gets wildly criticized for this. Some people even booed the idea when he was on stage at TED. But crazily, Bill’s idea was basically right, and it had a ton of ideas that would become a part of Google that will talk about here in a minute.

在 TED 的舞台上，Bill 因此遭到了猛烈批评，甚至有人当场嘘他。但疯狂的是，Bill 的想法基本正确，其中很多理念后来都成为 Google 的一部分，我们稍后会谈到。

Here’s how it worked. When you searched, GoTo would show you a list of the paid results exactly in order of who paid the most with no fanciness at all beyond that. They would show you the price that someone was willing to pay for your click. Right there on the page, you could see 21 cents, 23 cents, 24 cents.

其运作方式如下：当你进行搜索时，GoTo 会按出价高低依次列出付费结果，没有任何花哨之处，并直接显示每次点击广告主愿意支付的价格——0.21 美元、0.23 美元、0.24 美元等一目了然。

David: It was fully transparent.

David：这完全是透明的。

Ben: Yes. Insight number one, paid ads on keywords auctioned off to the highest bidder showing up first. Insight number two, and again this is way back in 98, was that this whole cost per thousand impressions thing was wrong, that eventually he thought the whole world was going to move beyond this to a cost per click or pay per click pricing. He thought, why not just do it today? So GoTo advertisers only had to pay when a user actually clicked.

Ben：是的。第一点洞见是，关键词付费广告通过竞价，由出价最高者排在最前面。第二点洞见——再次强调这是早在 1998 年——认为按千次展示计费（CPM）模式存在问题，世界最终会转向按点击计费（CPC）或付费点击。他想，为什么不现在就这么做？因此，在 GoTo 平台上，广告主只在用户实际点击时才付费。

The origin of this is since Bill had a bunch of companies at Idealab, he could uniquely feel this pain point. He hated the fact that he was getting billed for all these impressions at his companies when he just wanted to pay for the actual clicks.

这一想法的起源是，Bill 在 Idealab 拥有多家公司，他对这一痛点有切身感受。他讨厌自家公司为大量展示付费，而他只想为实际点击买单。

David: This is how advertising worked throughout all of human history to this point. There’s that famous John Wanamaker quote of, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I just don’t know which half.” This new model of performance-based advertising wasn’t possible until the Internet when you could track clicks and conversions. But now all of a sudden as an advertiser, you don’t have to worry anymore about what’s wasted. You know it’s all performing.

David：这正是广告在此之前整个人类历史中的运作方式。那句著名的 John Wanamaker 名言：“我在广告上的支出有一半被浪费了，可问题是我不知道是哪一半。”基于效果的广告模式直到互联网出现、能够追踪点击和转化后才成为可能。而如今，作为广告主，你再也不必担心钱被浪费，你知道每一笔都在发挥作用。

Ben: And the nuance is CPM actually works fine in brand building situations, but on conversion you actually care about the click. Basically with cost per click, you’re getting free exposure every time your ad shows up, but nobody clicks on it. But in a high intent environment, you’re not trying to get exposure. You’re trying to actually capture the click. It’s reasonable the way that it shook out that a lot of brand, brand-based advertising is still CPM-based, but on search engines it totally should be CPC.

Ben：需要区分的是，在品牌建设场景中，CPM 模式实际上运作良好；但在关注转化的场景里，你真正关心的是点击。按点击计费意味着广告每次展示都是免费曝光，只在被点击时才付费。在高意图环境下，你追求的不是曝光，而是捕获点击。因此，许多品牌类广告仍以 CPM 为主也合情合理；但在搜索引擎上，绝对应该采用 CPC。

So how did it go? Well, it worked insanely well out of the gate. GoTo did \$100 million in revenue in one year.

那么效果如何？事实证明它一开始就好得惊人。GoTo 在一年内就实现了 1 亿美元收入。

David: Way more than Google.

David：远远高于 Google。

Ben: This is a good business model, they have found. By the way, this is also self-serve. There is a website where you as an advertiser can log in and place a bid. There is an auction that happens, a realtime auction where the person with the highest bid, again placed through the website, is on the very top. Does this sound familiar to anyone who’s used Google’s advertising tools?

Ben：他们发现这是一个很好的商业模式。顺便说一句，这还是自助式的。作为广告主，你可以登录一个网站并出价。会有一场实时拍卖，出价最高的人（同样通过该网站出价）排在最上面。用过谷歌广告工具的人觉得耳熟吗？

So the \$100 million happened in year one. By mid 1999, they had 8000 advertisers. Compare that against what, AdWords had when they launched in October of 2000, which was 350 advertisers in the beta program? To your comment about scale, David, this can just scale to so many more advertisers.

第一年收入就达到了1亿美元。到1999年中，他们已有8000名广告主。对比一下AdWords在2000年10月发布时的情况——测试阶段只有350名广告主？正如你关于规模的评论，David，这种模式可以扩展到更多广告主。

GoTo goes public within a year. Isn’t this crazy? You’re probably sitting there thinking, how are they not the dominant player? One thing that did not happen was patents. They did not patent the idea of the auction or of pay-per-click.

GoTo不到一年就上市了。是不是很疯狂？你可能会想，他们怎么没成为主导者？原因之一是他们没有申请专利——既没有为拍卖机制申请专利，也没有为按点击付费的理念申请专利。

I got the chance to talk to Bill when we were prepping for this episode. He’s very direct about all this, very reflective, also a brilliant guy. He just thought they were obvious. He just thought, this is the way it should be done. Of course it should be build per click. Of course there should be an auction and the highest bidder is the one that wins.

在为本期节目做准备时，我有机会与Bill交流。他对这一切非常直率、富有反思，也非常聪明。他认为这些理念本来就显而易见：当然应该按点击计费，当然应该通过拍卖决定，出价最高者胜出。

The nuts and the bolts of it are that right before going public, the lawyers flagged, Hey, you really should patent some of this. But they were just outside the window of what was patentable because he shared them more than a year ago on stage at TED, so the ideas were no longer eligible.

事情的关键在于，公司上市前不久律师提醒说：“你们真的应该为其中一些理念申请专利。”但他们已错过了可申请专利的窗口期，因为Bill早在一年多前就在TED舞台上公开了这些想法，因此已无法再申请。

David: The TED Conference, that’s amazing. There’s some really interesting background to all this, too. You would think, of course Bill was right. This stuff is obvious. Why had nobody tried this until 1998?

David：TED大会，真是令人惊讶。这里面还有一些有趣的背景。你会觉得Bill当然是对的，这些东西显而易见。可为什么直到1998年才有人尝试？

Somebody actually had tried this earlier. There was a search engine called OpenText that did try paid search results in 1996. But the Internet was still enough of a utopian community, small enough and an outgrowth of academia that people booed Bill Gross and GoTo on stage at TED in 1998. In 1996 when OpenText tried to do this, they got kneecapped right away.

其实早些时候就有人尝试过。1996年有个叫OpenText的搜索引擎试过付费搜索结果。但那时的互联网仍像一个乌托邦式的小型学术社区。1998年Bill Gross在TED上介绍GoTo时遭到了嘘声。OpenText在1996年尝试时也立刻被打压。

Ben: Heresy, yeah.

Ben：亵渎，是啊。

David: Yeah, it was heresy. And because that happened, everybody else had a hangover from it of like, oh, that’s like a third rail. You can’t touch that. Internet users will never tolerate paid search.

David：没错，被视为亵渎。由于那次事件，其他人都心有余悸，觉得那是“高压线”，碰不得——互联网用户绝不会容忍付费搜索。

Ben: It’s funny. Maybe they wouldn’t have gotten the patents anyway since OpenText was doing it before. But that was the ethos of that early web is how dare you litter our organic results with your paid inclusion, putting these ads front and center.

Ben：很有趣。也许他们无论如何也拿不到专利，因为OpenText之前就做过。但那就是早期互联网的精神——你怎么敢用付费收录来污染我们的自然结果，把广告摆在最显眼的位置。

David: Originally, Larry and Sergey were thinking this too, right?

David：最初，Larry 和 Sergey 也这么想，对吧？

Ben: Yeah. The great irony is all this criticism—we’re going to flash forward for a second—when Google does launch AdWords v2, there’s a sidebar with a separate color. It looks super different. The word “sponsored” is very clear. You are very aware that you’re looking at a whole separate pane over there. That’s the paid icky world relative to my beautiful clean Google search organic results.

Ben：没错。讽刺的是，所有这些批评——让我们先快进一下——当 Google 推出 AdWords v2 时，页面侧边栏用了不同的颜色，看上去截然不同，并且“sponsored（赞助）”一词非常醒目，让你清楚知道那是一个完全独立的区域。与我干净漂亮的 Google 自然搜索结果相比，那就是付费、让人嫌弃的世界。

Anyone who’s used Google in the last few years knows the world basically ended up exactly the way Bill Gross envisioned. It’s one column of results. The first few are sponsored. In Google’s case, they label them even less than Bill was labeling them at GoTo. Then it’s followed by the organic results after that. What was once criticized as absolutely heretical has come to become basically the dominant model of search and search monetization today.

任何近几年用过 Google 的人都知道，现实最终完全照着 Bill Gross 的设想发展：搜索结果呈单列显示，最前面几个是赞助链接。在 Google 这里，它们的标识甚至比当年的 GoTo 还要低调，然后才是自然结果。曾被斥为“大逆不道”的做法，如今已成为搜索及其商业化的主导模式。

David: But the interesting thing is the timing was not right in the mid-90s for this. By the time the bubble was fully inflated, the Internet had become commercial enough that hey, it was okay for Bill to try this. Then he, GoTo, and Overture set the example of like, oh, this is how you’re going to monetize search. This is really how you’re going to monetize the Internet. Then Google can look and see, oh, maybe we should do that too.

David：有趣的是，90 年代中期做这件事的时机并不成熟。等到互联网泡沫完全吹大时，互联网已足够商业化，Bill 这样的尝试才变得可行。于是他、GoTo 和 Overture 树立了榜样：原来搜索可以这样赚钱，互联网可以这样变现。Google 看到后也会想，也许我们也该这么做。

Ben: A couple of quick things. Overture did file some smaller patents on the self-serve tools. Google did eventually end up owing them \$360 million for infringing. But these big ideas, CPC auction, those are now out there given to the world for free.

Ben：补充几点：Overture 确实为自助投放工具申请了一些小专利，Google 最终因侵权赔了他们 3.6 亿美元。但像 CPC 拍卖这样的重大理念，如今已免费奉献给整个世界。

Within the next two years, they realize that they can take this paid search model they have and bring it to portals too. Just like Google started doing organic portal deals, GoTo starts doing paid portal deals.

接下来两年里，他们意识到可以把现有的付费搜索模式推广到门户网站。正如 Google 先前做自然搜索的门户合作，GoTo 也开始做付费搜索的门户合作。

This goes so well, they become a B2B company. They rebrand. This is when they switch from GoTo to Overture. They start powering the ads for Dogpile, MetaSearch, then they get to the big boys with AOL and MSN, and eventually they get Yahoo. Yahoo alone was a \$100 million deal.

效果极佳，他们逐渐转型为 B2B 公司并更名，从 GoTo 变为 Overture。他们先后为 Dogpile、MetaSearch 提供广告服务，很快拿下 AOL、MSN 等大客户，最终拿下 Yahoo，仅 Yahoo 一家就达成了 1 亿美元的大单。

Google’s playing over here in fun pennies on the ground land where they’re, please sir, give me some money for the organic results. Meanwhile, Overture has it figured out these paid results, we are doing massive, massive white label rev share deals.

此时 Google 仍在辛苦地为自然结果赚点小钱，“先生，请为我们的自然结果付费”。而 Overture 则已通过付费结果搞清楚商业模式，与各大门户签订巨额白标分成协议。

David: Once they get to Yahoo, some huge percentage of Yahoo’s overall company revenue becomes paid search ads powered by Overture, right?

David：他们与 Yahoo 合作后，Yahoo 整体营收中有很大一部分来自 Overture 支持的付费搜索广告，对吧？

Ben: Yes. I think it’s like 75%. Let’s just flash all the way forward to this. Yahoo ends up buying Overture for \$1.6 billion. There’s a little bit of a bidding war back and forth with Microsoft, but that’s the final price. Yahoo basically says we have to own this thing. It is our revenue.

Ben：没错，大概有 75% 左右。再快进一下：Yahoo 最终以 16 亿美元收购了 Overture。期间还和微软有过一小番竞价，但最终价就是 16 亿。Yahoo 的想法很简单：这家公司攸关我们的收入，我们必须把它收入囊中。

David: And Yahoo’s market cap had gotten decimated when the bubble popped. This was a large portion of Yahoo’s market cap that they spent for Overture.

David：互联网泡沫破裂后，Yahoo 的市值已大幅缩水，他们用相当大的一部分市值去收购了 Overture。

Ben: But what choice did they have? They were over a barrel. The majority of their revenue was coming from this vendor who was rev sharing with them.

Ben：但是他们能有什么选择呢？他们已经进退维谷。他们的大部分收入都来自这家与他们进行分成的供应商。

David, to end the Overture story before we go over to what Google learn from all this and start implementing, some fun trivia. Did you know that GoTo tried to acquire Google?

David，在我们开始讨论 Google 从中学到什么并付诸实施之前，先来一点有趣的花絮。你知道 GoTo 曾经试图收购 Google 吗？

David: I did not know that.

David：我还真不知道。

Ben: Here’s how it went down. I asked Bill about this. Bill thought it was a match made in heaven. Google’s got the best way to bring relevant organic search with PageRank. Really amazing for informational, non-commercial searches.

Ben：事情是这样的。我问了 Bill。Bill 觉得这简直是天作之合：Google 通过 PageRank 提供最相关的自然搜索，对信息型、非商业搜索来说非常惊艳。

GoTo has this amazing paid system for the commercial searches. You should totally have one system that marries informational queries and commercial queries together. It’s got the two best ways to surface relevant things to you. One paid, one organic.

GoTo 拥有一套出色的商业搜索付费体系。应该让一个系统把信息查询和商业查询结合起来，用两种最优方式为你呈现相关内容：一种付费，一种自然。

Larry and Sergey, before they raised the Sequoia and Kleiner round, came to Bill and said, what about \$200 million?

在进行 Sequoia 和 Kleiner 融资之前，Larry 和 Sergey 找到 Bill，说：“2 亿美元怎么样？”

David: Wow.

David：哇。

Ben: Bill thinks actually seems fine. This seems fair. You guys are really onto something. They had a chance of getting acquired for 2x the valuation of that extreme fundraise.

Ben：Bill 觉得这挺不错，价格也公平——你们确实很有潜力。他们本有机会以那次高估值融资的两倍价格被收购。

David: Wow. Was Overture already public at this point?

David：哇。那时候 Overture 已经上市了吗？

Ben: Yes. Then Bill goes to the rest of the Overture board. Overture at the time is worth \$2 billion. The board, their conclusion is basically, how could we give up 10% of our very important, valuable, revenue-generating company to this little company with zero revenue?

Ben：是的。接着 Bill 去找 Overture 的其他董事。当时 Overture 估值 20 亿美元。董事会得出的结论基本是：我们怎么能把这家重要、有价值、能赚钱的公司 10% 的股份让给一间毫无收入的小公司？

Google并不清楚自己要走的路，这跟乔布斯和苹果很不一样。

David: It’d be a diluted transaction.

David：那会造成股权被稀释。

Ben: And so no deal.

Ben：于是交易告吹。

David: Well, there’s almost zero chance that Google becomes Google if that deal had happened, so yeah.

David：嗯，要是那笔交易真成了，Google 几乎不可能成为今天的 Google，所以——是的。

Ben: Exactly. That’s the thing with these ‘what would’ve happened otherwise’ acquisitions.

Ben：没错。这就是这些“如果当年成功收购会怎样”的故事带来的意味。

David: That’s amazing. Back to fall of 2000 when Larry and Sergey and Google can now finally focus on improving their ads product. I think we heard this from folks in the research.

David：太了不起了。回到 2000 年秋天，当时 Larry、Sergey 和 Google 终于能够专注于改进他们的广告产品。我记得我们在研究中听到人们这么说。

Once they saw how well the GoTo and Overture model was working, I think Larry and Sergey were kicking themselves of, we should have just done this from the beginning. Why did we waste time doing this the other way? Yeah, it’s going to take a lot of technology to build this out and we’re going to have to focus on it, but it’s obviously the better business.

当他们看到 GoTo 和 Overture 模式运转得如此出色时，我觉得 Larry 和 Sergey 肯定懊悔不已：我们一开始就该这么做，何必浪费时间走另一条路？没错，要把它做出来需要大量技术投入，也必须全力以赴，但显然这才是更好的生意。

Ben: Obviously, Larry and Sergey, geniuses from their childhood through their undergrad research projects. The way that they conceptualize the original PageRank algorithm, everything, truly geniuses. But the second superpower on top of that is it doesn’t always need to be their idea. They’re very good at hearing the best idea, whether it’s from outside of Google or someone else inside Google and adopting that and making that the thing that they run with.

Ben：很明显，Larry 和 Sergey 自幼到大学科研项目都是天才。他们构思最早的 PageRank 算法等一切，都是真正的天才之作。但他们的第二项超能力在于，想法不一定非得出自他们自己。他们擅长倾听最佳创意，不论来自 Google 外部还是公司内部，然后采纳并加以实施。

David: So October, 2000, they put Salar on the project to improve AdWords. The first obvious thing that they need to do is they need to build a self-serve system. As long as Google’s still taking manual orders for ads, they’re not going to be able to implement any of the technology to bill people per click or anything like that.

David：于是 2000 年 10 月，他们让 Salar 负责改进 AdWords。首要任务显而易见——打造自助系统。只要 Google 仍靠人工接广告订单，就无法实现按点击计费等一系列技术。

Ben: Or let in smaller advertisers and expand the pool.

Ben：也无法让规模更小的广告主加入，进一步扩大客群。

David: Exactly, which clearly Overture had shown there was a market for this. They had 8000 advertisers against Google’s couple of hundred that they were selling by hand.

David：没错，而 Overture 早已证明市场的存在——他们拥有 8000 名广告主，而 Google 手动销售的广告主才几百家。

Ben: Famously, by the way, Tim Draper was looking to invest in Overture and eventually did lead their round. To test it out, he actually opened up his computer and he bid on the keyword ‘VC’ when they were pitching him.

Ben：顺带一提，Tim Draper 当年打算投资 Overture，最终也领投了他们的融资。为验证系统，他在对方路演时打开电脑，亲自出价竞拍关键词“VC”。

David: That’s amazing.

David：太棒了。

Ben: That’s the historical proof I have that Overture had self-serve, and then he got outbid. It was like one penny, two pennies, and then he started a bidding war over the term ‘VC.’

Ben：这就是 Overture 拥有自助系统的史料佐证——Tim 的出价很快被超越，一美分、两美分……结果把“VC”这个词炒起了一场竞价大战。

David: Oh, that’s such a great story. I love it. Okay, so obviously they need self-serve. That’s the first thing to work on. But Sal and Larry behind the scenes too are clearly thinking like, okay, how do we do this in a googly way? Yes, we’re going to borrow a lot from Overture, but I think they had a spidey sense already that wasn’t googly or we’re so pure over here, but also that it wasn’t quite right that Overture had gotten like three quarters of the way there on cracking the business model.

David：哦，这故事太精彩了，我喜欢。显然，他们必须先搞定自助系统。但 Sal 和 Larry 暗中也在思考：我们怎样才能用“Google 式”的方法来做？没错，我们会大量借鉴 Overture，可他们直觉上觉得，Overture 虽然在商业模式上破解了大半，却仍差点火候，不够“googly”。

The thing that Salar and the team really start noodling on is we’ve got this beautiful algorithm in PageRank that can deliver highly relevant organic results. Is there a way that we could incorporate something like that into our ad system as well and ensure ad quality.

Salar 和团队真正开始研究的是：我们有 PageRank 这种能提供高度相关自然结果的漂亮算法，能不能把类似机制整合进广告系统，用来保证广告质量？

Yes, the paid system in and of itself goes a long way towards ensuring ad quality, Ben, as you were talking about earlier, but there’s still potential for abuse here. What can we do to really make sure that these things are good?

没错，正如 Ben 你之前所说，付费模式本身已在很大程度上保证了广告质量，但仍存在被滥用的可能。我们怎样才能真正确保广告优质？

If we’re an online self-serve system, we’re measuring clicks. We’re going to ultimately switch to paper click. We could track those click-through rates. What if we made that a signal to the ranking of how we show the ads?

如果我们是线上自助系统，就能统计点击，最终要转向按点击计费。我们可以追踪点击率。如果把点击率用作广告展示排序的一个信号，会怎样？

It’s not just fully pay-to-play where if you pay the most, you get placed at the top. But actually we incorporate as part of our ad ranking system how effective your ads are at click-through rate. That might solve the problem.

如此一来，就不仅是纯粹“花钱买排位”，而是把广告点击率作为排名因素的一部分，出价高又高效的广告才能排在前面，这也许能解决问题。

Ben: Such is the birth of Ad Rank. You’ve got PageRank that uses all the clever things we talked about earlier, with number of people linking to you and how authoritative those sources are for the organic results, to make sure that the most relevant results are being surfaced to you.

Ben：这就是 Ad Rank 的诞生。PageRank 利用了我们之前提到的各种巧妙方法——包括链接到你的网站数量及其来源的权威性——来生成自然结果，确保向你呈现最相关的内容。

Now we have a way over in the paid side of the house with Ad Rank, to take all the great stuff that we just talked about with Overture—the self-serve model, the auction, the cost-per-click-based system. We add in click-through rate and we feed it back into the algorithm creating Ad Rank, which is really the main two things going into where your ad is going to be positioned in the ranking. It’s both how much you’re willing to bid and it’s how often are users actually clicking through so they know that it’s the right ad to be showing at that right moment. Click-through rates are a proxy for relevance.

现在，在付费侧我们用 Ad Rank 把 Overture 的精妙设计整合进来——自助投放、拍卖、按点击计费。再加入点击率这个信号并反馈到算法中，形成 Ad Rank。决定广告排位的两大核心因素就是：你愿意出的价格，以及用户真实点击的频次，这代表在合适时刻呈现了合适广告。点击率是衡量相关性的代理指标。

不是单纯的复制，有一些自己的创新。

David: And by the way, as a really nice side benefit of that, if your formula for placing ads is a combination of the price that an advertiser is willing to pay per click and the click-through rate of the ad, well that’s actually the mathematically optimal formula for maximizing your own revenue as Google.

David：顺带一提，这里还有一个意想不到的好处：当广告排序公式结合了广告主的每次点击出价及其点击率时，从数学上看，这正是 Google 最大化自身收入的最优解。

Ben: Oh, that’s interesting.

Ben：哦，真有趣。

David: Highest price paying per click, then the highest likelihood to click. That is the ad that you should show to maximize your own revenue.

David：出价最高、点击概率也最高的广告，就是能让你收入最大化的广告。

Ben: It’s basically an expected value calculation.

Ben：本质上就是一次期望值计算。

David: Exactly.

David：没错。

Ben: Oh, that’s funny. But it’s also perfect for advertisers because it means that if you’re a better advertiser for that keyword, then you actually get to pay a lower price. If people are more natural to click through to your service and transact on your product, you get the privilege of bidding lower prices and still winning the auction.

Ben：太好玩了。不过这对广告主也很完美：如果你是某个关键词下更契合的广告主，就能以更低价格获胜。用户更倾向于点击并完成交易，你就有资格用较低出价仍赢得拍卖。

David: All incentives are aligned for the user.

David：对用户来说，各方激励也完全一致。

Ben: Oh, and for the user, because then it means that the user is only ever seeing products that are the most relevant.

Ben：没错。对用户而言，这意味着他们只会看到最相关的产品。

David: Yup. It’s funny how all of this gets rolled out. It’s fall of 2000. They start working on this. The first version they launch includes self-serve and includes ad quality, but it doesn’t yet include CPC or the auction, which is funny. It’s like they did the hardest technical stuff first.

David：是啊，这套系统的推出过程也很有趣。2000 年秋天他们开始研发，首个版本已经具备自助功能和广告质量评估，但尚未加入 CPC 和拍卖机制，反而先做了最难的技术部分。

This first rev in the fall of 2000 attracts a ton of advertisers. You’ve now opened the flood gates to the long tail of advertisers, and you’ve introduced this click-through rate element, this ad quality element—Ad Rank—to how ads are going to get served.

2000 年秋的这个首版吸引了大量广告主。长尾广告主的闸门被打开，点击率和广告质量（即 Ad Rank）也被引入广告展示逻辑。

Advertisers pretty quickly figure out they’re still paying on a CPM basis, not on a per click basis. They figure out that they can game the system by clicking on their own ads because that’ll boost the click-through rate and then their ads will get shown.

广告主很快发现自己仍按 CPM 付费而非按点击付费，于是有人开始刷自己的广告来提高点击率，从而让广告获得更多展示。

Ben: That’s so funny.

Ben：真是太好笑了。

David: They’re not paying per click, so they’re not costing themselves money when they’re clicking on the ads.

David：他们并不是按点击付费，所以自己点击广告并不会让他们花钱。

Ben: It’s actually an efficient use of impressions to use them internally to boost click-through rate.

Ben：事实上，内部刷点击来提高点击率是对展示机会的高效利用。

David: Exactly. It becomes for a set of months, the greatest arbitrage in the history of the Internet was to click on your own ads.

David：没错。有好几个月，互联网上最好的套利方式就是点击自己的广告。

Ben: That’s so funny.

Ben：太搞笑了。

David: Oh and Google. But it proves that this is going to work. Then they fully borrow after that. We’re now into 2001. They borrow the rest of the model from Overture with the cost-per-click payment basis and the auction model. Now interestingly, they do one up Overture on the auction model. They go to the second-price auction.

David：而且是发生在 Google 上。但这证明了模式可行。之后他们就完全照搬。现在到了 2001 年，他们从 Overture 那里照搬了余下的模式——按点击付费和拍卖机制。而有趣的是，在拍卖机制上他们还超越了 Overture，改用“第二价格拍卖”。

Ben: This is such a genius mechanic. There are eight genius mechanics we’ve talked about so far in the episode, but this one really sings. If you’re the winner of an auction, they make it so you never have to pay anything more than one penny above second place.

Ben：这个机制简直天才。咱们这期节目聊到了八个天才机制，这个尤为精彩。如果你赢得了拍卖，你只需比第二名多付一美分。

Let’s say I bid 20 cents, you bid 30 cents, and then some other guy bids 50 cents. Well, that other guy is going to win, but he is only going to have to pay 31 cents. You might say, well that’s silly for Google. They’re leaving money on the table. But what Google is thinking is with a much longer lens and saying, well, we’d rather have our advertisers (a) trust us and feel like we’re not gouging, and (b) not feel like they have to constantly check and fiddle, and look to see who the other bidders are, and if they want to adjust their price. It’s actually a long-term value-maximizing thing to do, even though in the short run, of course you’re leaving pennies on the table each click.

假设我出价 0.20 美元，你出价 0.30 美元，另一个人出价 0.50 美元。那么那个人会赢，但他只需支付 0.31 美元。你或许觉得 Google 这样做太傻，白白少赚钱。但 Google 从更长远的角度考虑：（a）让广告主信任他们、觉得自己没被宰；（b）广告主也不必不停地检查、微调和盯着竞争对手调价。长远来看，这反而能最大化价值，尽管短期内会在每次点击上少赚几分钱。

天才的竞价机制，应该不是自己发明的，而是聪明的借鉴了已有的优秀的做法。

David: It’s a version of, Ben, you have this theory that you and I have been talking about, that every great company has a stored potential energy of value maximization, that it doesn’t fully maximize. Costco is the extreme example of this, but Google has this too.

David：Ben，这呼应了你的一个观点——每家伟大公司都储备着一部分未被完全释放的价值最大化“势能”。Costco 是极端例子，Google 其实也一样。

Ben: That’s a great point. The second-price auction is storing potential energy in a way.

Ben：说得好。“第二价格拍卖”某种意义上就是在储存这种势能。

David: There’s a fun story around this. As you can imagine, this is a little hard to explain to advertisers when they roll it out, like how this works, why it’s going to be good for them, et cetera.

David：这还有个趣事。可以想象，这种新机制推出时很难向广告主解释——它怎么运作、为他们带来什么好处等等。

Ben: They used to just write one check.

Ben：过去他们只需开一张支票。

David: And send a fax.

David：再发一份传真。

Ben: And that check bought them a big batch of impressions. And now you have this confusing morass.

Ben：而那张支票只买来一大批展示机会。现在你却面对一团令人困惑的麻烦。

David: There’s a fun little story about how to educate advertisers around how this model works. All of this full version of AdWords that we know today, had launched at the very beginning of 2002.

David：有个有趣的小故事，讲的是怎样向广告主解释这种模式的运作方式。如今我们所熟知的完整 AdWords 版本于 2002 年初推出。

Sheryl Sandberg had joined the company right around that same time too. She was working on ads. Part of her job is to pitch to advertisers what this new model is and explain it to them.

Sheryl Sandberg 也在差不多同一时间加入公司，负责广告业务。她的部分工作就是向广告主推介这种新模式并加以说明。

She’s banging her head against the wall, it’s so hard to do. She calls up her mentor, Larry Summers, who had previously been the US Treasury secretary, and Sheryl had been his chief of staff there.

她为此头疼不已，觉得解释太难。于是给自己的导师、前美国财政部长 Larry Summers 打电话；Sheryl 曾在财政部担任他的办公厅主任。

She’s like, Larry, I’m having a hard time explaining this to advertisers. You know how this model works, the second price auction, it’s weird. Larry’s like, oh, this is what’s called a Vickery second bid auction. There’s a lot of economic literature about this. This is the optimal way to do auctions, and this is actually how the Federal Reserve sells its treasury bonds. You should just tell advertisers that.

她说：“Larry，我很难向广告主解释这套二价拍卖模式，好奇怪。”Larry 回答：“哦，这叫 Vickery 二价拍卖。经济学文献里早有大量论述，这是最优拍卖方式，美国联邦储备系统卖国债就用这个。你只要把这些告诉广告主就行。”

So she does it. I don’t think it sinks in right away, but eventually advertisers get the message.

于是她照做了。我想广告主一开始未必立刻领会，但最终还是明白了。

Ben: That’s funny. I do know this was very painful for Google to do, to transition all their advertisers over to this new model. They actually called it Project Sunset, where they had to sunset them off the old model, bring them onto the new pricing. Even though it’s better for everyone, is miserable along the way. I have a funny coda for you to the whole Overture thing.

Ben：真有趣。我知道 Google 当时迁移所有广告主到新模式的过程非常痛苦，他们把这个项目称为 “Project Sunset”，要让旧模式退出、把广告主迁到新定价上。尽管最终对所有人都更好，但过程相当折磨。我这儿还有个关于 Overture 的有趣尾声。

David: Great. Go for it.

David：好啊，来吧。

Ben: I think it is correct that Google, and particularly Salar, led the charge on the insight that click-through rate is really important and factoring it back in is relevant.

Ben：我认为的确是 Google，尤其是 Salar，率先意识到点击率非常重要，并把它重新纳入算法。

Overture did also figure it out earlier. The problem was that after the team implemented it, advertisers, as you would imagine, no longer knew how much to bid.

Overture 其实也较早意识到了这一点。问题是团队上线后，广告主（如你所料）再也不知道该出多少价。

Overture’s whole thing was, we have this transparent thing on the page where we show the prices, and whenever you load up a page now the prices were out of order. You’re like, well, what am I supposed to bid to get the top spot? And also, it makes it plain and clear, you guys are supposed to be transparent. Now you’re this confusing black box.

Overture 一直强调页面上价格透明可见，可现在每次刷新，价格顺序就乱了。广告主会想：那我该出多少才能排第一？而且你们号称透明，现在却成了令人困惑的黑箱。

Overture did not take the pain of transitioning over to this new model. They just abandoned it and said, we’re not going to mess with this click-through rate thing, which ended up being crucially important to the model.

Overture 不愿承受转型之痛，干脆放弃这套新模式，声称不想折腾点击率——结果证明点击率最终对整个模式至关重要。

David: This also highlights something that we would be remiss not to say as well. The technical infrastructure to dynamically execute second bid auctions every single time a user is making a search query, was incredible, especially at Google scale.

David：这也凸显了一点，我们若不提就太失职了——要在用户每次搜索时都能动态执行二价拍卖，其技术基础设施之强大令人难以置信，尤其是在 Google 的规模下。

Ben: In 2001 with the technology available then, yes.

Ben：在 2001 年当时的技术条件下，确实如此。

David: I totally believe that Overture did try to implement it, had the same idea. Also that Overture had really good technology too. I think that is true. But again, back to Google’s infrastructure, the commodity hardware, the scaling out data centers, the distributed file system, and distributed computing, to really scale this, you needed special infrastructure that only they had.

David：我完全相信 Overture 也尝试过实现同样的想法，并且他们的技术也相当不错，这确实是事实。但说到底，Google 的基础设施——通用硬件、大规模扩展的数据中心、分布式文件系统和分布式计算——才真正让这种系统具备了独一无二的扩展能力。

We’re talking about the pain of transitioning the Google ad model and ultimately the whole business over to this new beautiful AdWords model and how hard that was to put some numbers on it. In 2001, the year that the Yahoo deal saved the company, Google for the year ultimately did \$86 million in revenue that year and \$10 million in profit. So turned profitable in 2001.

我们在谈 Google 将广告模式乃至整个业务迁移到全新的华丽 AdWords 模式所经历的痛苦。用数字来说明：Yahoo 合作拯救公司的 2001 年，Google 全年收入最终为 8600 万美元，利润 1000 万美元，也就是说 2001 年实现了盈利。

Great numbers by any metric for a startup and especially in the middle of the dot-com winter. But almost all of that revenue was the combination of these portal deals and the old ad system that was in place. Project Sunset and transitioning over to the new ad system put a large portion of that revenue at risk.

对于一家初创公司而言，尤其是在互联网寒冬中，这些数字已相当亮眼。但其中几乎所有收入都来自那些门户合作和旧有广告系统。“日落计划”把广告主迁移到新系统，意味着将很大一部分收入置于风险之中。

Ben: Oh yeah.

Ben：确实如此。

David: It was not necessarily an easy decision. It was an easy decision because the performance was so clearly better. Eventually economic incentives would kick in, but it was still a little tenuous there in Google land for a while.

David：这决定并不轻松。说简单也简单，因为新系统的效果明显更好，经济激励最终会显现，但在那段时间里，Google 的处境仍相当微妙。

Ben: The other thing that’s happening at this exact same time is Eric Schmidt arrives and discovers that 50% of Google’s searches are outside the US, but they have no international ad sales. There’s no international business.

Ben：就在同一时期，Eric Schmidt 加入后发现，Google 有 50% 的搜索来自美国以外地区，却没有任何国际广告销售，也就是毫无国际业务。

He almost jokingly tells Omid, just go get on a plane. Go to the airport Monday morning. I’ll call you and tell you what market where to buy a ticket to, and we’ll just go from there.

他半开玩笑地对 Omid 说：直接去机场吧，周一早上到那儿等我电话，我告诉你去买哪趟航班的票，然后我们就从那开始。

David: Or just pick a country and we’ll figure it out.

David：或者你随便挑个国家，我们再想办法。

Ben: They build basically these little startup teams in a bunch of different geographies that act as their own company selling Google ads on the new system. But it basically works.

Ben：他们基本上在多个地区组建了小型创业团队，像独立公司一样在新系统上销售 Google 广告，但成效显著。

Year one, because Omid spent the whole year on the plane, 18% of revenue is now international. 2002 accrued 22%, 2003 accrued to 29%. Today it’s half of Google’s business. They even had a business in China for a long time until famously they got into a fight with China that started in, when was that? 2002 and…

第一年里，由于 Omid 整年都在飞行，国际收入已占 18%。到 2002 年增至 22%，2003 年增至 29%。如今，国际收入占到 Google 业务的一半。他们曾在中国经营多年，直到与中国的摩擦——那是什么时候开始的？2002 年，然后……

David: 2003–2004, something like that.

David：大概 2003–2004 年左右。

Ben: Yeah. Eventually Google finally just withdrew and rather than censoring results in 2010, but basically everywhere that is not China starting in 2001 with Schmidt being like, we need an international business, they grew themselves a just fine international business.

Ben：是的。最终 Google 于 2010 年选择退出而非审查搜索结果。不过，自 2001 年 Schmidt 提出“我们需要国际业务”起，除中国外的所有市场，Google 都成功建立了相当可观的国际业务。

David: Yup. So 2002 is this year of transition to AdWords for the company. Spoiler alert: it worked. In 2002, the company did \$440 million of revenue. So up whatever that is, 5x–6x from the \$86 million they did the year before, while transitioning all of that revenue to the new model. When I say all of that revenue, I really do mean all of it because a lot of that \$86 million remember was the portal partnership deals.

David：没错。2002 年是公司过渡到 AdWords 的关键一年。剧透一下：改版成功。当年公司实现 4.4 亿美元收入，比前一年的 8600 万美元增长约 5–6 倍，并在转型过程中将全部收入迁至新模式。我说“全部”可不是夸张，因为那 8600 万里有很大一部分来自门户合作协议。

By midway through 2002, Google’s realizing that paid search and AdWords is working so well, we should stop having portals pay us for organic search. We should start paying them to do paid search on their sites and share the ad revenue. That leads to the landmark summer 2002 deal with AOL.

到了 2002 年年中，Google 已认识到付费搜索和 AdWords 效果太好，不该再让门户为自然搜索付费，而应向门户支付费用，在其网站上投放付费搜索并共享广告收入。这促成了 2002 年夏与 AOL 的里程碑式合作。

Ben: Oh yes. But before we tell that story, now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies, Vercel.

Ben：没错。但在讲述这段故事前，我们先来感谢我们最喜欢的公司之一——Vercel。

David: Vercel is such an awesome company. Over the past few years, they’ve become the infrastructure backbone that powers modern web development. Now, the AI wave too. If you visited a fast, responsive website lately, or used a slick, AI-native app with agents and hyper-personalized interfaces, there’s a good chance it was built and deployed on Vercel.

David：Vercel 真是一家了不起的公司。过去几年，它已成为现代 Web 开发的基础设施支柱，如今也支撑着 AI 浪潮。如果你最近访问过速度飞快、响应敏捷的网站，或使用过带有智能代理和高度个性化界面的炫酷 AI 原生应用，很大概率都是用 Vercel 构建并部署的。

Ben: The reason for that is that Vercel has completely reimagined the developer experience for the modern era. In the old world, developers had two completely different jobs: write code then wrestle with deployment. Vercel eliminated that second component with what they call framework-defined infrastructure that transforms your code into live, globally distributed applications automatically.

Ben：原因在于 Vercel 完全重新构想了现代时代的开发者体验。在过去，开发者的工作分两步：写代码，然后为部署头疼。Vercel 通过所谓的“框架定义基础设施”消除了第二步，自动将代码转化为实时、全球分布式应用。

David: But now, Vercel is enabling something even more incredible—shipping live code as fast as AI generates it. In the past, even the very best web companies used to deploy new production code roughly on a daily cadence. Now, companies like DoorDash and Notion are just shipping constantly on Vercel.

David：如今，Vercel 更让人惊叹的一点是——代码生成多快，就能多快上线。过去，即便最优秀的 Web 企业，也大多每日部署一次新代码。而现在，DoorDash、Notion 等公司在 Vercel 上实现了持续不间断部署。

Ben: And Vercel is increasingly the platform to build full-stack AI apps. Vercel has been synonymous with frontend development, but now they do backend and age agentic workloads as well.

Ben：而且 Vercel 正逐渐成为构建全栈 AI 应用的平台。Vercel 一直是前端开发的代名词，如今他们也支持后端及代理式工作负载。

David: Exactly. Vercel is their own guinea pig with this stuff, too. Their own AI product, V0, has 2½ million users who’ve generated more than 100 million messages with 6 app generations every second. V0 runs entirely on Vercel’s platform. We did an ACQ2 episode with Vercel’s CEO Guillermo back in February where we talked about all this. It’s wild.

David：没错。Vercel 也把自己当小白鼠测试这些技术。他们的 AI 产品 V0 拥有 250 万用户，已生成逾 1 亿条消息，每秒生成 6 个应用。V0 完全运行在 Vercel 平台上。今年 2 月我们在 ACQ2 节目中与 Vercel CEO Guillermo 聊过这些，真是太疯狂了。

Ben: If you want to learn more about what Vercel can do for AI and web development at your company, join customers like Runway, Supreme, PayPal, Ramp, NerdWallet, Leonardo AI, Zapier, and Scale AI, then head on over to vercel.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben：如果你想了解 Vercel 能为你们的 AI 与 Web 开发做些什么，加入 Runway、Supreme、PayPal、Ramp、NerdWallet、Leonardo AI、Zapier 和 Scale AI 等客户行列，访问 vercel.com/acquired，并告诉他们是 Ben 和 David 推荐的。

Okay, so the AOL deal. One context-setting thing just to see how fast Google’s world changed in 2002 with the new AdWord system, it going phenomenally well. As recently as late 2001, just months before, there’s a dinner with Terry Semel, who’s the CEO of of Yahoo. Big media executive guy comes in, takes over the big media CEO.

好，来说说与 AOL 的交易。先铺垫一下：2002 年借助新版 AdWords，Google 的世界变化有多快。就在几个月前的 2001 年底，雅虎 CEO Terry Semel 参加了一场晚宴——这位大媒体高管刚接任雅虎掌门人。

He sits down with the founders and he says, so guys, I think we’re your biggest customer. Us paying you for those organic results in the portal deal. They say, yup. He says, that’s less than $10 million that we’re paying you. You don’t have a business, do you? The business can’t be that big if we’re your biggest customer at less than $10 million and everyone’s all excited about you. They’re like, we’re excited about some of the things they have in the works, and they’re clearly thinking about this new AdWord system that they’re going to launch. On the spot, he offers to buy Google for $1 billion dollars.

他和两位创始人坐下说：“伙计们，我想我们是你们最大的客户——门户合作里我们付费买你们的自然搜索结果。”两位说：“是的。”他接着说：“我们给你们的钱不到 1000 万美元。你们其实没什么生意吧？如果我们花不到 1000 万就成了你们最大客户，你们的业务不可能很大，可大家却对你们无比兴奋。”创始人回应说，他们对正在推进的一些东西很兴奋，显然指的是即将推出的新 AdWords 系统。Semel 当场出价 10 亿美元收购 Google。

David: Wow.

David：哇。

Ben: Even knowing you aren’t doing much revenue. And this is at a time Google was so secretive pre-IPO. No one knew, other people in the business. Terry Semel sits down. He didn’t have a real sense of their revenue. He just knew that he was the biggest customer. I think this illustrates just what an insane 12 months it was to go from being in that position to the numbers that you just shared on, what is it, 5x revenue in a year?

Ben：即便知道你们收入不多。那时 Google 尚未上市，对外极为神秘，业内没人知道他们的真营收。Semel 只是知道自己是最大客户。这充分说明，在短短 12 个月里，Google 从那种境地到你刚才提到的数字——一年营收增长 5 倍——究竟有多疯狂。

David: Yup. They more than 5x revenue from 2001 to 2002 from that $86 million to $440 million in revenue.

David：没错。他们的营收在 2001 到 2002 年从 8600 万美元跃升至 4.4 亿美元，增长超过 5 倍。

Ben: So they’re feeling really good about this, so they decide to go to AOL, the big source of traffic. AOL has 34 million users at this point. It’s funny imagining this recently, AOL was still a big and important company, but if they could figure out how to be the search results provider and more importantly, the ad provider for AOL that is a potentially company-making event.

Ben：他们对此充满信心，于是决定去找流量大户 AOL。当时 AOL 拥有 3400 万用户。想想看，那时 AOL 仍是举足轻重的大公司。如果 Google 能成为 AOL 的搜索结果供应商，更重要的是广告供应商，那可能就是改变公司命运的大事件。

David: Hell, 2002, I was probably just transitioning from using AOL as my way to access the Internet as a senior in high school. I think we had maybe just gotten broadband that year, maybe the year before.

David：天哪，2002 年，我高三时大概才刚刚从用 AOL 上网过渡出来。我记得我们大概那年，或者前一年才刚装宽带。

Ben: Funny how sometimes things feel like a lifetime ago, and sometimes they feel like just yesterday.

Ben：真有意思，有时候那些事仿佛已是前尘往事，有时候却又像发生在昨天。

David: Right? Okay, summer 2002, the transition to the new AdWords model is blowing the doors off. Google goes to AOL.

David：可不是？好了，2002 年夏天，过渡到新版 AdWords 的效果好得惊人。于是 Google 找上了 AOL。

Ben: Which by the way, Yahoo sees this. They come back and say, how about \$3 billion?

Ben：顺带一提，这一切被 Yahoo 看在眼里。他们回过头说：要不 30 亿美元怎么样？

David: I had heard about that \$3 billion number.

David：我确实听说过那 30 亿美元的报价。

Ben: Google comes back and says, how about \$5 billion? Of course, no deal gets done and this would be the last time that they seriously try to acquire the company.

Ben：Google 接着回敬：那 50 亿美元怎么样？当然，最终没能成交，这也是他们最后一次认真想收购 Google。

David: But then Yahoo would buy Overture. But as I pointed out a minute ago, when Yahoo bought Overture for \$1.6 billion, that was a huge portion of Yahoo’s market cap. If they had actually done the \$5 billion price that the Google founders floated at them, it would’ve been reverse takeover. It would’ve been Google taking over Yahoo.

David：不过后来 Yahoo 收购了 Overture。但正如我刚才提到的，Yahoo 斥资 16 亿美元买下 Overture 时，这已占了 Yahoo 市值的很大一块。如果他们真的接受了 Google 创始人提出的 50 亿美元报价，那就成了反向收购——等于是 Google 把 Yahoo 吃下了。

Ben: Oh, that’s a good point. In fact, Google throwing out \$5 million is almost a fart. It’s like, how about we buy you?

Ben：哦，说得对。事实上，Google 抛出 50 亿美元几乎是在放“臭屁”——意思就是：要不干脆我们来买你？

David: It’s a counter offer, yeah. We’ll buy you.

David：这确实是一次反报价：没错，我们要买你。

Ben: That’s so funny. This AOL deal. The current state of things is that the 34 million AOL users, their search experience is powered by Inktomi on the organic side since 1999—the last 3 years—and Overture—the last 2 years. It’s a bake-off of do we want those two or do we want just one to take over all of it since Google seems to have the whole package now.

Ben：真好笑。说回这桩与 AOL 的交易。现状是：AOL 的 3400 万用户在搜索时，过去三年自然结果由 Inktomi 提供，过去两年付费结果由 Overture 提供。现在要比拼的是——我们是继续用这两家，还是让看起来“全包办”的 Google 一家接管一切？

Google wins the deal. Here’s the shape of the deal. We can talk about the philosophy behind it, but it’s worth knowing the bullet points. Advertisers will all sign up with Google. Clean. They use Google’s UI. Google can sign them up. Or AOL can say, hey advertiser. I know we have a longstanding relationship. You can buy ads on our properties other than search, but for search, here’s the URL you go to to place your order with Google.

结果 Google 赢得了这笔交易。协议大致如下——背后的理念稍后再谈，先看要点：所有广告主都要在 Google 注册，流程清晰，使用 Google 的界面，由 Google 来接入。或者 AOL 也可以对广告主说：我们关系深厚，你仍可在搜索以外的 AOL 业务投放广告，但若要投放搜索广告，请访问这个 URL 到 Google 下订单。

David: Okay, go through the rest of the deal points, but this is huge.

David：好的，再把其余条款过一遍，但这事可非同小可。

Ben: That is huge. Google will then share back 85 cents on the dollar to AOL for all of that revenue. AOL wants two things in exchange for turning over their entire business in the search advertising world to Google.

Ben：是的，非常重大。Google 会把每赚一美元中的 0.85 美元分给 AOL。作为把搜索广告整盘业务交给 Google 的交换，AOL 提出两项条件。

One is we want more coverage. what they end up getting granted is the option to buy 7.4 million shares of Google at \$3 per share, so a total of a \$22 million investment. They get that as part of the deal. Two is a \$100 million revenue guarantee.

第一，我们想要更多收益保障，于是他们获得了以每股 3 美元购买 740 万股 Google 股票的期权，总额 2200 万美元，作为协议的一部分。第二，是一条 1 亿美元的营收保底条款。

David: Yup. We want to make sure that, hey, even if this whole thing falls apart, you’re going to pay us at least \$100 million and hopefully more if these ads perform well. And we’re getting 85%.

David：没错。AOL 的意思是：即使一切失败，你们至少得支付我们 1 亿美元；如果广告效果好，还要更多。并且我们拿 85% 的分成。

Ben: Here’s the crazy thing. Google doesn’t have \$100 million. When they’re negotiating this deal in May of 2002, it’s just starting to work.

Ben：疯狂的是，Google 根本拿不出 1 亿美元。2002 年 5 月谈判时，新模式才刚见起色。

Sergey Brin has a quote. He says, “We could have gone bankrupt. This is quite literally Google betting the company.” The way to think about it is financial leverage. They took on a fixed dollar denominated obligation with that revenue guaranteed AOL. if there was upside to Google, it would’ve been a huge, huge win. But if there’s downside in their business of serving…

Sergey Brin 说过：“我们差点破产。这简直是 Google 在豪赌公司前途。”从金融杠杆角度看，他们承担了一笔固定金额的义务来给 AOL 保底收入。如果 Google 业务向上，那会是巨大胜利；但如果投放业务出现下行……

David: If they couldn’t make it work on AOL…

David：如果他们在 AOL 那儿搞不成……

Ben: Right. They obviously have very high confidence that it would, but if something happens and they’re like, oh shoot, we actually can’t sell these things at the rates that we thought, it would’ve gone from like, oh shucks, bummer, to now that we’ve signed this deal, we’re bankrupt.

Ben：没错。他们显然信心很高，但若真发生意外，发现广告卖不到预期价，那就会从“哎呀，真糟糕”瞬间变成“完了，签了这合同就破产”。

David: This was a really, really contentious decision. I think it ultimately came down to Larry and Sergey pushing for this.

David：这是个极具争议的决定。最终还是 Larry 和 Sergey 力主推进，才拍板实施的。

Ben: You are absolutely right. There’s a great quote in Ken Auletta’s book about this where Omid says, “You’re betting the company if you do that, and Larry Page responds, we should be able to monetize the pages. If not, we deserve to go out of business.”

Ben：你说得完全正确。肯·奥莱塔的书里有句精彩的引言，Omid 说：“如果这么做，你就是在赌公司的命运。”Larry Page 回应道：“如果我们连页面都无法变现，那我们就该倒闭。”

David: Well, that’s great. Yeah, those are the deal terms, but that first one of advertisers are going to use Google’s system, this is why it’s worth betting the company.

David：太棒了。没错，条款就是这样，但第一条——广告主必须使用 Google 的系统——正是值得公司下赌注的原因。

This is when Google discovered what we talked about on our Meta episode, when Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, had the insight that more ads equals better ads, and then argued to Zuck and Sheryl like, no, we need to show more ads in feeds, and then they’ll get better.

就在这时，Google 发现了我们在 Meta 那期节目里提到的道理：首席技术官 Andrew Bosworth 意识到“广告越多，效果越好”，他和扎克伯格、Sheryl 争论说，需要在信息流里展示更多广告，质量自然会随之提升。

The more ad inventory you have in your system, if you’re serving them dynamically based on a ranking and targeting them, you want to have as much inventory as possible to give you as many candidates to choose the best ad to serve. Onboarding all of AOL’s search ad inventory into Google’s system, was hugely strategically valuable.

系统中的广告库存越多，在按排名动态投放并做精准定位时，可选候选越丰富，就越能挑出最佳广告。因此，把 AOL 的全部搜索广告库存接入 Google 系统，在战略上价值巨大。

Ben: It’s a market liquidity thing.

Ben：这是市场流动性的问题。

David: Exactly.

David：完全正确。

Ben: Basically, the more volume you have in your market, the more deeply-traded the market, the more likely you are to have an ad that has perfect product/market fit with the query.

Ben：简单来说，市场体量越大、交易越活跃，就越容易出现与查询完美匹配的广告。

David: If you have a thin pool of advertisers, and several folks I talked to at Google made this point to me that if Google had come out of the gates with the AdWords business model in all of its glory that it ultimately became, it would’ve been very hard to bootstrap from a cold start, because you would’ve had this inventory problem. You wouldn’t have been able to deliver the magical, high quality ad experience because you would’ve had a very thin inventory of advertisers. You almost had to bootstrap it up how they did, and then onboard this other supply into the marketplace to get deep liquidity.

David：如果广告主池子太小——Google 内部好几个人都跟我提到这一点——假如 Google 一开始就拿最终成熟的 AdWords 商业模式直接上线，几乎不可能从零起步，因为库存太薄，无法呈现那种“神奇”的高质量广告体验。必须先像他们那样慢慢孵化，再把更多供给接入市场，才能形成深度流动性。

Ben: It’s funny. I just want to pause for one second. When you say magical, there’s nothing magical about search ads, but I think you’re right that they’re the least offensive. They’re the most likely to be what I’m looking for without giving me any delight whatsoever.

Ben：有意思，我想插一句。当你说“神奇”时，其实搜索广告也谈不上神奇，但你说得对，它们最不让人反感，最有可能正是我想找的东西，虽然并不会让我感到惊喜。

David: Sorry. I meant magical from an economic standpoint. It is the most magical economic transaction I think ever known man.

David：抱歉，我指的是经济层面的“神奇”——这可能是人类迄今最神奇的经济交易。

Ben: For an advertiser, you are reaching the exact right person at the exact right time when they have the most intent possible to find your service. It is actually a pretty magical economic lever.

Ben：对广告主而言，你在最合适的时刻触达最合适的人，对方正怀着最强烈的需求寻找你的服务——这的确是一把相当神奇的经济杠杆。

David: Well, to your point at the beginning of the episode that Google with this business model makes more profits than any other company, ergo tautologically, is the most magical business model ever discovered.

David：嗯，就像你在本期节目开头指出的，凭借这种商业模式，Google 的利润超过任何其他公司，因此可以说这是迄今为止最神奇的商业模式。

Ben: So the Inktomi comment on this—they commented to the Wall Street Journal on AOL’s decision—they’ll learn over time that Google takes your users. It doesn’t help you build your property. Which wasn’t wrong. How many people use any portal today versus how many people use Google directly today?

Ben：Inktomi 对此曾在《华尔街日报》上评论 AOL 的决定——他们终将发现 Google 会把你的用户带走，并不会帮助你建设自己的平台。这并没错。如今还有多少人使用任何门户网站，而有多少人直接使用 Google？

So how did this actually go? They made this huge bet. They put \$100 million on the line. You better be really, really sure that you can come through when you’re betting your company.

那么结果如何？他们下了巨大赌注，押上 1 亿美元。当你以公司为赌注时，必须无比确信自己能兑现承诺。

David: It worked.

David：成功了。

Ben: It worked. AOL made \$35 million in 2002, the first half year of the deal alone. Then in 2003 made \$200 million.

Ben：成功了。仅在 2002 年上半年，AOL 就赚了 3500 万美元；2003 年又赚了 2 亿美元。

David: Wow. Yeah. Blow through the guarantee there.

David：哇，的确，轻松突破了保底金额。

Ben: Absolutely. This made Google a major player in the paid listings market almost overnight. They weren’t at all before. Overture dominated this market before. This is a absolute bet the company move that couldn’t have gone better.

Ben：确实如此。这几乎一夜之间让 Google 成为付费列表市场的主要参与者，而在此之前他们根本算不上玩家，市场一直由 Overture 主导。这是一次押上公司命运却再成功不过的行动。

David: And they were taking all that inventory effectively from Overture, who was AOL’s partner before this.

David：而且他们实际上把之前属于 Overture 的全部库存都拿了过来；要知道 Overture 此前一直是 AOL 的合作伙伴。

Ben: That’s exactly right. This is also where Sheryl Sandberg really makes her Mark. She joined, David, as you mentioned, sometime in the last year, right around when Eric Schmidt joined or right after that. She was looking for the right job to do. She’s poking around the company. I think she’s a business unit manager or something like that, but Google didn’t really have business units.

Ben：完全正确。这也是 Sheryl Sandberg 真正崭露头角的地方。正如你提到的，她在去年某个时候加入 Google，大约在 Eric Schmidt 上任前后。她一直在寻找合适的工作角色，到处了解公司情况。我想她的头衔类似事业部经理，但当时 Google 并没有真正的事业部。

Omid sits down with her and says, you’re looking for a big job, right? and she says yes. He said, we have this huge AOL deal that we just signed. We have a ton of new advertisers and a bunch of categories that we have no idea how to service. We need an army of people to handle these thousands of new advertisers.

Omid 找她谈话说：你想要一份大职位，对吧？她回答是。Omid 说：我们刚签下这份巨大的 AOL 合同，新进大量广告主和许多我们完全不懂的品类。我们需要一支大军来应对这数以千计的新广告主。

They have to be smart and they have to be adaptable because we have no systems built for this yet. Then over time, they’re going to have to figure out how to scale themselves so that we’re not constantly hiring more people. They need to feed ideas into our technology organizations to make it so that we get more leverage off of the people that we hire.

这些人必须聪明且适应力强，因为我们还没有任何配套系统。随后他们必须想办法自我扩展，这样我们不用不断地招聘新人；他们还要向技术团队反馈想法，以便让现有人员发挥更大杠杆效应。

She basically hired all these great people, built out the entire AdWord sales function to service this monster AOL deal. That was what she did at Google before going and becoming COO at Facebook.

她招来了这些优秀人才，建立了完整的 AdWords 销售体系来服务这笔巨额 AOL 合同。这就是她在离开 Google 出任 Facebook 首席运营官之前完成的工作。

David: We’ll talk about that on the next Google episode here. This also (I think) as Google’s digesting this deal and realizing the huge strategic value of it, this really gives them license to then go play offense on traffic acquisition everywhere.

David：我们将在下一期的 Google 节目中继续讨论。与此同时，我认为在消化这笔交易并意识到其巨大战略价值的过程中，这也真正赋予了 Google 到处主动获取流量的许可。

Basically the light bulb now goes off of if we can have Google search, paid and organic, be part of the user experience anywhere on the Internet, we should do everything possible to do that because it will build our liquidity pool and our business, and we will just monetize the Internet.

简单来说，他们终于灵光乍现：如果我们能让 Google 搜索——无论付费还是自然结果——成为互联网任何地方用户体验的一部分，就应不遗余力去做，因为这将扩大我们的流动性池和业务规模，而我们也将由此实现对互联网的全面变现。

Ben: Oh boy, will it ever. David, do you want to do distribution? Do you want to go there right now?

Ben：哦，伙计，绝对要说。David，你想先讲分发吗？现在就讲？

David: Let’s go there. Great.

David：那就讲分发吧。好。

Ben: I’ve been chomping at the bit. We’re going to talk about all the crazy stuff they did for distribution, but before that, it’s worth a discussion of the business model of search. We’ve been talking about it all episode, but there’s a very particular unique characteristic that once you realize it, it completely changes how you should think about distribution.

Ben：我等不及了。我们要聊聊他们在分发上做的各种疯狂操作，但在此之前，值得先讨论一下搜索的商业模式。我们整个节目一直在谈这个，但有一个特别独特的特性，一旦明白了，就会彻底改变你对分发的思考方式。

Search is a winner-takes-all market. Not just because it’s large, consumer-facing, and it’s horizontal across industries. There’s something more to it than that, a second layer.

搜索是一个赢家通吃的市场。这不仅因为它面向大众、规模大、跨行业横向覆盖，还在此之上有第二层原因。

They’ve got all the traditional economies of scale that you would expect it. If you make 1000 of a widget, you get cheaper pricing than if you make 10 of that widget. Just like everyone else, they amortize the fixed costs of their infrastructure and their employees.

它具备所有传统的规模经济：产量越高，单件成本越低。就像其他公司一样，Google 也要摊销基础设施的固定成本和员工成本。

David: And they have a better infrastructure model, as we were talking about earlier, et cetera.

David：而且他们有更出色的基础设施模型，就像我们前面讨论的那样，等等。

Ben: Exactly. But there’s this crazy thing that happens with Google where at scale not only do their cost decrease on a unit basis, their revenue actually increases per unit. Here’s what by that. When you have more bidders on every keyword, you have better price discovery in that little market, and the winning bid is a higher price than it would be if they had less bidders.

Ben：没错。但 Google 的奇妙之处在于，随着规模提升，不仅单位成本下降，单位收入反而上升。原因是：每个关键词的竞价者越多，市场价格发现越有效，赢家出的价格也越高。

David: This is another reason why you want a deeper market liquidity pool.

David：这也是你需要更深度市场流动性的另一个原因。

Ben: Yes. The second thing too is you have bidders on keywords that are less common. Let’s say you’ve just got the 100 biggest advertisers in the world. You only get to monetize some of your searches. But if you’ve got a big long tail of advertisers or just a lot of advertisers, then you get to advertise more of your searches. It’s more likely that any given search results in revenue.

Ben：是的。第二点是，你会有针对小众关键词的竞价者。假设你只有全球前 100 大广告主，你只能在部分搜索上变现。但如果有大量中小广告主，就能在更多搜索上投放，那样任何一次搜索带来收入的可能性会更高。

Having marketplace liquidity means you always generate the most revenue per search versus other smaller search engines. It’s not just that unit costs go down, it’s that as they scale, their revenue per search actually goes up due to the auction system.

拥有充足的市场流动性意味着，你每次搜索产生的收入会超过其他小型搜索引擎。不仅单位成本下降，而且随着规模增长，拍卖机制让每次搜索的收入也提高。

David: There’s a third statement that you need to add to, Boz’s insight from the Facebook days of more ads equals better ads. It’s more ads equals better ads equals better business.

David：还有第三点要补充，就是 Boz 在 Facebook 那里的洞见：“广告越多，效果越好”。也就是“广告越多，效果越好，业务越好”。

Ben: Absolutely. It is crazy that there’s this, you make more money per search the bigger you scale in this auction-based marketplace system.

Ben：完全正确。令人惊讶的是，在这个基于拍卖的市场体系中，随着规模越大，你每次搜索赚的钱也越多。

David: It’s increasing returns to scale.

David：这就是规模报酬递增。

Ben: Exactly. Then keep following the logic tree. Because each search is worth more, well, each user is worth more over their lifetime. Which means you can pay more than other search engines can to acquire a new user.

Ben：没错。逻辑继续往下走：每次搜索价值更高，意味着每位用户的终身价值也更高，这就能让你在用户获取上比其他搜索引擎出更高价。

Once you realize this and you get a little bit ahead—this is where Google is right now in history, in that 2002 era—you can start pressing your advantage. Once you start doing that, it’s really hard for anyone to catch up.

一旦你明白并抢先行动——这正是 2002 年左右的 Google——你就可以着手放大优势。一旦这样做，就很难有人后来居上。

The cycle is get distribution—we haven’t yet talked about how, but somehow we’ve talked about a little bit in the portal deals—which drives volume of searches, more searches drives keyword bids, keyword bids drive up price in auctions, the price creates more revenue for Google, more revenue for Google means they can pay more for distribution. The virtuous cycle obviously goes on.

这个循环是：获得分发——我们接下来要说如何做到，但在门户合作中已略有提及——带来更多搜索量；更多搜索带动关键词竞价；竞价推高出价；更高出价为 Google 创造更多收入；更多收入让 Google 能投入更多到分发上。这个良性循环不断自我强化。

The obvious lesson, do not just sit back and let organic growth do its thing. Even though they’ve got great organic growth and the best brand in the world here in 2001–2002, you want to be aggressive and gobble up this market as fast as you can because someone else is going to have this insight too.

显而易见的教训是，不要坐等自然增长。尽管在 2001–2002 年，他们拥有极佳的自然增长和全球最佳品牌，你仍要积极出击，尽可能快地吞没市场，因为别人迟早也会洞察到这一点。

So then the tactics, what do you do? One, pay massive revenue share to your distribution partners. In some cases, up to 100% of the revenues generated. We’ll talk about who the distribution partners are in a second. But even earlier we heard with that AOL deal, they were willing to give AOL 85%.

那么战术是什么？第一，向分发渠道支付高额收入分成。在某些情况下甚至高达 100%。稍后我们会讨论这些渠道是谁。不过早在与 AOL 的合作中，他们就愿意给出 85% 的分成。

David: That’s a huge split.

大卫：这个分成比例真是太大了。

Ben: With some partners, they were incredibly aggressive. It was like, we’re going to give you all the revenue for a while.

本：对某些合作伙伴来说，他们的手段极其激进，就像在说，“我们先把所有收入都给你”。

David: Just to get you on.

大卫：只为了让你先合作进来。

Ben: Exactly. If Google monetizes each search the most, then their rev share to distributors are going to be better than anyone else. Let’s say they give away the same percentage as other people. Oh, we’re only given away 70%. Well that’s more than someone else’s 70%. So, press that advantage. Go 100%. I even heard one example where they gave more than 100% where they realize the payback on this is just so…

本：没错。如果谷歌每一次搜索的变现能力是最强的，那么他们给渠道分配的收入也会比任何人都多。就算他们只是分出和别人同样的比例，比如70%，他们的70%也超过其他竞争对手的70%。因此，他们会充分利用这一优势，甚至达到100%。我甚至听说过一个案例，他们分出的比例超过了100%，因为他们意识到回报实在是太大了……

David: This property is so valuable, they get this distribution.

大卫：这种流量入口的价值太大了，以至于他们不惜代价要拿下这个渠道。

Ben: Yes. Eventually, it just doesn’t make economic sense for a competitor to match your pricing. They literally will run out of money to try to spend the way that you can spend because your monetization per user is so high. Realizing this is a secret weapon.

本：是的。最终，对于竞争对手来说，跟进你的定价将毫无经济意义。他们根本没有足够的钱像你一样去花费，因为你的每用户变现能力太高了。意识到这一点，就掌握了一个秘密武器。

This is also where being private was nice. Some of the other search engines were public by this point. They were reporting very consistent metrics that they wanted to continue reporting. Google could irrationally do things like, eh, we’re going to overpay for distribution in this case, and they could potentially risk having a worse quarter.

这也是私人公司拥有的优势所在。当时其他一些搜索引擎已经是上市公司，他们必须持续报告稳定的业绩指标。而谷歌则可以“不理性”地做一些事情，比如说，这次我们宁愿为了渠道支付过高的费用，即使可能因此导致某个季度表现较差。

Ultimately, Google discovered this property and they had a belief that no one else had, which is search is going to be really, really big. Not like \$1 billion dollars big or \$10 billion big. Search is currently half a trillion dollar annual revenue market. This is a market worth betting everything on. They had the stomach to invest very, very, very heavily, where others thought like, geez, is the final payoff going to actually be worth investing into this market? And Google thought it’s literally worth any amount of money that we could invest in this, especially in being first and being biggest.

最终，谷歌发现了这一特点，并且他们拥有别人所没有的信念，那就是搜索市场会变得极其庞大。不仅仅是10亿美元或100亿美元的规模。搜索现在是每年五千亿美元的市场。这是一个值得孤注一掷的市场。他们敢于非常、非常、非常大规模地投资，而其他人却还在犹豫，怀疑这种投资是否会最终带来足够的回报。谷歌则认为，无论花多少钱去投资都是值得的，尤其是在成为市场第一和最大的玩家方面。

David: We’ve been talking so far about distribution deals in terms of these search deals with portals. Tell us about some of the other crazy stuff they end up doing. Because once you realize this, the game just becomes, get users and advertisers at all costs.

大卫：我们目前谈到的都是和门户网站达成搜索分销合作的交易。跟我们聊聊他们后来还做了哪些疯狂的事情吧。因为一旦意识到这个关键点，竞争的游戏就变成了，不惜任何代价获得用户和广告主。

Ben: That’s exactly right. Currently, people need to know how to type in google.com. That sucks. It would be really nice if you could get users without having to hear that from a friend and load up a webpage to start searching and hopefully you bookmark it. You don’t own a browser. How do you get a Google search box to actually appear in the browser instead of on google.com?

本：没错。人们现在必须知道要在地址栏输入google.com，这一点很麻烦。如果能让用户无需朋友介绍，无需先打开网页再开始搜索并且希望他们把网址收藏起来，那就好了。但你又没有自己的浏览器。那你怎么才能让谷歌的搜索框直接出现在浏览器上，而不是用户自己去输入google.com呢？

David: Which, by the way, Microsoft owns the browser right now. If there’s anybody you need to be afraid about figuring out this secret, it’s Microsoft.

大卫：顺便说一下，现在浏览器属于微软。如果有谁值得你害怕发现这个秘密，那肯定就是微软了。

Ben: And Microsoft definitely did figure out this secret.

本：而微软确实也最终发现了这个秘密。

David: And just to be a little more specific on that, Google was already going and starting to pull away from the rest of the market. It would’ve taken a boatload of money to try and compete with Google even a year or two into this.

大卫：具体一点来说，谷歌当时已经开始明显地拉开与其他竞争者的距离了。即使再等上一两年，任何人想要与谷歌竞争，也都要花费大量的资金。

Ben: Which almost no one except Microsoft has.

本：而除了微软以外，几乎没有谁能负担得起这样的成本。

David: And then spoiler alert for part two, who would a few years later try to spend a boatload of money to compete with Google? Microsoft.

大卫：剧透一下第二部分，几年之后，到底是谁尝试砸下巨额资金与谷歌展开竞争呢？微软。

Ben: Okay, so Microsoft’s got Internet Explorer. Google doesn’t have a browser. What do you do? It’s December of 2000. We are not talking Chrome territory here. Google toolbar, baby.

本：好，那么微软拥有Internet Explorer浏览器，而谷歌自己却没有浏览器。你要怎么办？现在是2000年12月，当时根本还没有Chrome这种东西。于是，谷歌工具栏横空出世了。

David: Google toolbar. Man, when this came up in the research, it was the biggest blast from the past of both. Man, I love that thing. Man, I had not thought about that in about 15 years. And holy crap, everybody thought this was just this gift that the benevolent Google gods bestowed upon the Internet ecosystem. No way. It was a hugely strategic business model piece for them.

大卫：谷歌工具栏。当研究这个话题时，这真是我们遇到的最怀旧的东西之一。天啊，我当年超级喜欢用这个东西。我大概有十五年没想起它了。当时几乎所有人都觉得这是谷歌这位“仁慈的互联网之神”赐予互联网生态的一份礼物。但其实根本不是。这是他们在商业模式上极具战略意义的一步。

Ben: Here’s how it worked. They shipped it super early in December of 2000. This is 2½ years after the company was founded. Before they’ve figured out AdWords v2, they had just launched AdWords v1.

本：它的运作模式是这样的。他们在2000年12月非常早的时候就推出了谷歌工具栏。那距离公司成立才两年半，当时他们甚至还没完全搞清楚AdWords的第二代模式，只是刚刚推出了AdWords第一版。

It is both the offense we’re talking about here of go be aggressive, get users, but also defense. Google’s paranoid about Microsoft entering and using Internet Explorer as a weapon. If Microsoft owns the browser, they can direct the traffic wherever they want. Maybe we should, for younger people, explain what toolbars are?

这是攻守兼备的战略手段。一方面要积极进攻、争取用户，另一方面谷歌非常担心微软会利用Internet Explorer作为武器进入市场。因为如果微软控制了浏览器，他们就能随意操控用户流量。我们可能得向年轻一点的人解释一下工具栏是什么东西？

David: What Google toolbar is. Yeah, what toolbars are.

大卫：谷歌工具栏是什么东西。对，工具栏到底是个什么玩意儿。

Ben: It was a plugin, the equivalent of a browser extension, that would basically create a bar underneath your bookmarks bar. I don’t know if bookmarks bars were even a thing yet. Kind of where the bookmark bar is.

本：工具栏是一种插件，相当于今天的浏览器扩展，安装后会在浏览器的书签栏下方额外创建一条工具栏。当时书签栏是否存在我不太确定，但位置差不多就在现在书签栏的位置上。

David: Yeah, at the top of the window.

大卫：对，就在浏览器窗口最上方的位置。

Ben: It had a little Google search box in it among some other functionality. You could just search right from the toolbar without having to go to the website.

本：工具栏上有一个小小的谷歌搜索框以及其他一些功能。你不用特意进入谷歌官网，直接就能从工具栏搜索。

David: Nowadays, every modern browser, you just search from the bar at the top of the browser.

大卫：如今，所有现代浏览器都是直接从最顶部的地址栏搜索了。

Ben: They’re used to be two different things. There was a URL bar and first that’s all there was. Then eventually they put in a search field inspired by the Google toolbar.

本：过去，地址栏和搜索栏是两个不同的东西。一开始只有地址栏，后来浏览器才因为谷歌工具栏的启发增加了搜索框。

Here’s the economics on how it all works. Once Google toolbar was installed, a user averaged seven times the number of searches.

下面来讲讲它背后的经济逻辑。一旦用户安装了谷歌工具栏，平均每个用户的搜索次数会上升七倍。

David: Obviously.

大卫：这很明显。

Ben: Which makes them seven times more valuable, which means you could pay a lot of money to get someone to install it.

本：这意味着用户的价值变成了原来的七倍，也就意味着你可以为让用户安装工具栏花很多钱。

David: So how did they pay money to get users to install the Google toolbar?

大卫：他们是怎么付钱让用户安装谷歌工具栏的呢？

Ben: Because they weren’t paying users. The average annual revenue generated by a Google user was \$2, but with toolbar, it was \$10+ even if you’re being conservative. That difference, that somewhere of \$8 a user call, is your budget to play with. Estimates are that Google ended up spending on average way less than this for a Google toolbar install, but you can understand the amount of lift that they get from a Google toolbar when you understand, wow, it’s worth \$8 more per user in this year. By the way, average revenue per user (ARPU) is skyrocketing. It’s growing very quickly, so this \$8 is just, this year’s…

本：其实他们不是直接给用户付钱。当时谷歌每位用户每年的平均收入大约是2美元，但安装工具栏之后，即使保守估计也能达到10美元以上。这中间每个用户差额约8美元，就是他们用于推广工具栏的预算。据估计，谷歌实际在工具栏安装推广上的平均花费远低于这个数字。但你可以想象，当用户一年价值增加8美元时，他们的收入会有多大的提升。此外，用户平均收入（ARPU）当时正快速攀升，这8美元只是当年的数字……

David: Going to become \$20, \$50, \$100.

大卫：未来可能会达到20美元、50美元甚至100美元。

Ben: So Google just paid everyone that they possibly could to bundle Google toolbar with their installer of an application. This includes Adobe. You downloading an Adobe app, hey, congratulations. You have a Google toolbar. You don’t know it, but Google just paid Adobe a bunch of money. Real Networks, same thing. Winzip, same thing. They were hyper aggressive.

本：谷歌几乎向所有能找到的软件公司支付费用，让他们把谷歌工具栏捆绑到应用安装包中，包括Adobe。当你下载Adobe软件时，恭喜你，你现在拥有了谷歌工具栏。你可能不知道，但谷歌为此向Adobe支付了一大笔钱。Real Networks也是如此，WinZip同样如此。他们的手段极为激进。

360还给所有电脑安装病毒。

David: And just to be really clear about what’s happening here, when users are downloading programs, what apps used to be called to run on their computers, Google is paying the maker of that program to include a Trojan horse payload of the Google toolbar, which will then become a Trojan horse that lives in your internet browser and Internet Explorer, and Google will make a lot more money from you.

大卫：为了清楚地解释发生了什么，当用户下载软件（当年我们称之为应用程序，用于电脑运行时），谷歌付钱给软件开发者，让他们在安装包中植入谷歌工具栏这个“特洛伊木马”，然后这个“木马”就会驻扎在你的浏览器或IE中，从而让谷歌从你身上赚更多的钱。

Ben: The most horrible way to describe this is that it’s adware, it’s spyware, it’s a Trojan.

本：最糟糕的描述方式是称它为广告软件、间谍软件或者特洛伊木马。

David: But users loved it. I love the Google toolbar.

大卫：但用户却喜欢它。我本人就非常喜欢谷歌工具栏。

Ben: Totally. But the technique itself…

本：完全同意。但从技术手段本身来说……

David: Are you going to get into pop-up blocking?

大卫：你准备要讲一下弹窗拦截吗？

Ben: No. Lay it on me.

本：还没有，你来讲吧。

David: As they were building the toolbar and thinking about users are going to love this because users love Google and being able to access search, that’s value prop in and of itself for this thing, but pop-up ads were a problem on the Internet at this point in time. One of the most popular plugins for web browsers were pop-up blockers. Google decided, well hell, why don’t we make the Google toolbar also a pop-up blocker?

大卫：当时他们开发工具栏时，本来就认为用户会喜欢，因为大家都喜欢谷歌，都喜欢方便的搜索入口，这本身就是巨大价值。但当时网络上还有个很大的问题，就是弹窗广告。当时最受欢迎的浏览器插件之一就是弹窗拦截器。于是谷歌就决定，干脆把谷歌工具栏也做成弹窗拦截器吧？

Ben: Just one more incentive to install it and become a sticky Google user. Genius. They even did a deal with Dell directly to make sure that when new PCs shipped with Windows, they shipped with Google toolbar pre-installed on Internet Explorer.

本：这又给了用户一个安装工具栏并成为谷歌长期用户的理由，真是个天才般的想法。他们甚至直接和戴尔达成了协议，确保每一台预装Windows系统的新电脑都会在IE浏览器上预装谷歌工具栏。

David: Amazing.

大卫：太厉害了。

Ben: They famously did a deal to become the default search engine in Firefox, just as it was becoming popular, which served as Mozilla’s main revenue source for decades. This is a great one that’ll be real close to home, David. You remember the Google Earth acquisition?

本：另外，他们还与Firefox浏览器达成了一项非常著名的协议，就在Firefox开始流行时，让谷歌成为其默认搜索引擎。这项协议在随后的十几年里一直是Mozilla的主要收入来源。下面这件事你应该特别熟悉，大卫。你还记得谷歌收购Google Earth的事情吗？

David: Oh yes, I do. Classic Acquired episode.

大卫：当然记得，Acquired节目的经典案例之一。

Ben: Google’s an ad-based business. They buy Earth. There’s conversation in Google, how do we put ads inside Google Earth? Well, instead of doing that, they realized that Google Earth is going viral. People are downloading this thing like crazy because it’s really cool to just play with a globe on your—

本：谷歌是一家靠广告赚钱的公司。当时他们收购了Earth后，内部曾讨论过如何在Google Earth里植入广告。但他们后来发现Google Earth的传播非常迅速，因为大家都疯狂下载它，觉得在自己电脑上玩弄这个酷炫的地球仪太有趣了……

David: The original Google Earth was a program that ran on your computer. It wasn’t baked into Google Maps, the web app yet.

大卫：最早的Google Earth是安装在本地电脑上的程序，当时还没整合进网页版的Google Maps。

Ben: And Google Maps was very lame compared to Google Earth. They did very different functions. Maps was clearly for driving directions. Earth was, oh my God, I can zoom in on my house and it’s all 3D. It’s super cool.

本：相比之下，当时的Google Maps功能还非常简单，两个产品的功能截然不同。Google Maps明显就是用来导航，而Google Earth则让人兴奋地发现：“天啊，我竟然能放大到看到自己家的房子，而且还是3D的！太酷了！”

They just bundled Google toolbar with the installs of Google Earth, and then it more than paid for itself. We don’t need to do ads.

他们最终的做法是将谷歌工具栏捆绑到Google Earth的安装包中，这样的操作给他们带来的收益远远超过了成本。他们根本不需要再额外植入广告。

David: Way more than paid for itself.

大卫：收益远超成本。

Ben: It’s crazy.

本：简直疯狂。

David: No need to put ads in Google Earth.

大卫：完全没必要在Google Earth中加入广告了。

Ben: It’s so crazy. In the mid-2000s, ARPU would eventually grow \$10, \$20, \$30, and always a Google toolbar user was stickier than a non-toolbar user. They just had more and more and more budget to play with in acquiring users. Not to spoil too much, but obviously this still plays out all the way to the much debated apple Safari deal today, and the tens of billions of dollars that Google still pays to Apple in traffic acquisition costs.

本：这真的太疯狂了。在2000年代中期，用户平均收入（ARPU）逐渐涨到了10美元、20美元、30美元，而且安装了谷歌工具栏的用户黏性总是高于非工具栏用户。他们因此拥有越来越多的预算去争取新用户。虽然不想剧透太多，但显而易见的是，这种模式至今仍在持续，例如那个饱受争议的苹果Safari搜索协议，谷歌如今仍需向苹果支付数百亿美元的流量获取成本。

The takeaway here is, yes, they had the best product. Yes, it was fast. Yes, it was the best technically competent. Yes, they had this amazing culture. But everyone forgets about the fact that they were so aggressive in distribution deals. They didn’t just let people magically find their way to Google.

这里的关键在于：没错，他们有最好的产品；没错，他们的搜索速度最快；没错，他们技术能力超群；没错，他们有惊人的企业文化。但人们总是忽略了他们在渠道分销上是多么激进。他们并非只是被动等待用户自行发现谷歌。

David: And it was also strategic. As I’ve been talking to people over the last month about making this episode, talking to friends, thinking about how to position it, this first Google episode feels like when we made the Costco episode. It’s the same beautiful ballet where every piece of the Google business model works together and reinforces the other pieces, and in concert it creates the best business model of all time.

大卫：并且，这种做法非常具有战略性。在过去一个月里，为了准备这期节目，我跟很多朋友讨论、思考如何阐述这个话题。感觉这期关于谷歌的节目就像我们之前制作的Costco那期节目一样，每一个环节都像是一场精彩的芭蕾舞表演，谷歌商业模式的每个部分都相辅相成、相互强化，共同成就了历史上最成功的商业模式之一。

Ben: It’s funny. Toolbar happened to be the one that worked, but it wasn’t the only thing they tried. They tried so many desktop applications. They even had one called Google Desktop that would search your desktop and then incorporate those results privately into your web searches.

本：很有意思的是，工具栏恰好成功了，但这并非谷歌尝试的唯一产品。他们还推出了大量的桌面应用程序，比如他们曾有一款叫Google Desktop的软件，它能在你的电脑本地搜索文件，并私密地将搜索结果整合到网页搜索中。

David: The original Google Enterprise Search application, reincarnated as Google Desktop.

大卫：最早的谷歌企业级搜索软件，后来被重新设计成了Google Desktop。

Ben: But that’s basically the strategy for all these applications and clients, is how do we make you a more sticky Google user. Do you know the final chapter of this story of in 2004, a new PM is hired by Google? They come in and they take over this applications client team that includes Google Toolbar. That PM is Sundar Pichai.

本：而所有这些客户端和应用背后的策略其实都是一样的：如何让你成为谷歌更忠实的用户。你知道这个故事的最后一章是什么吗？2004年，谷歌招进了一位新的产品经理，他入职后接管了负责谷歌工具栏等应用程序的客户端团队。这位产品经理就是桑达尔·皮查伊（Sundar Pichai）。

David: That’s right.

大卫：没错。

Ben: And that is all we will talk about for Sundar on this episode, but obviously he will come into play much more in the future.

本：今天关于桑达尔的故事我们就讲到这里，显然他未来会在我们的节目中扮演更重要的角色。

David: Well, it really highlights how important Google toolbar was. And how secretive the company was about this really being like this strategic linchpin of what they were doing. Or a strategic linchpin.

大卫：这真的凸显了谷歌工具栏的重要性，以及谷歌当年对它在公司整体战略布局中作为关键支柱角色的极端保密程度。

There’s one more business-building story to tell here before we get to the IPO and the end of this episode. It’s another version of this extension of the Google business model. And that is AdSense.

在我们聊谷歌IPO以及结束本期节目之前，还有另一个业务增长的故事要讲，这是谷歌商业模式另一种延伸版本，那就是AdSense。

Ben: Which is Google’s second big business line after AdWords on search pages.

本：AdSense是继搜索页面上的AdWords之后，谷歌的第二个重要业务线。

David: It’s another brilliant insight of how to extend the strategic Google business model. Before AdSense, Google was limited to making money when a search happened. That was the atomic unit of the Google business model was a search query.

大卫：这是谷歌又一次精彩的战略洞察，进一步扩展了其商业模式。在AdSense出现之前，谷歌只能依靠用户进行搜索时来赚钱。也就是说，谷歌商业模式的基本单元就是一个搜索查询。

Ben: Which actually doesn’t happen that often. It’s a really valuable thing when it happens because it’s high intent. But most of the time someone loads up a page, it’s a website that is not google.com,

本：而实际上，这种情况（用户进行搜索）并没有那么频繁。当它发生时当然非常有价值，因为它代表着明确的意图。但大部分时候，人们打开的是其他的网站，而不是google.com。

David: You’re consuming content on the Internet much more often or for a higher share of time than you are running queries and searches. Queries and searches have high intent, so they’re really, really valuable, but there’s all this other time and content on the Internet that Google can’t monetize.

大卫：你在网上浏览内容的时间，要远远多于你主动进行搜索的时间。当然，搜索查询有明确的意图，因此极其有价值；但与此同时，互联网上还有大量用户的其他时间和内容，是谷歌无法实现变现的。

But because of everything that they built for PageRank and organic search, and understanding what’s on a page and then serving the page of search results, and then also for the ad system for ad targeting, ad quality, and predicting click-through rate, they realize that well actually we don’t really need a query to happen to serve effective ads against what a user is consuming. What if we essentially run a version of the same algorithms on static pages, on publishers’ webpages, and then reverse serve the keywords that we would’ve served for a search query that would’ve landed on that page? It’s absolutely brilliant.

但由于谷歌之前为了建立PageRank算法和自然搜索，已经开发出对网页内容的精准理解能力，包括根据页面内容生成搜索结果的能力，以及针对广告进行定向、质量判断和预测点击率的能力。他们意识到，其实即便用户没有主动搜索，也可以针对用户当前浏览的内容精准投放广告。如果我们在发布者的静态网页上运行类似的算法，反过来推算用户可能输入的关键词，并匹配相应广告，会怎样呢？这真是一个绝妙的想法。

Ben: It’s a little bit different because they’re matching the ads to content instead of to intent. It’s try to fit in with the content around it. But if you’re consuming content, you likely have some future intent around that content. Or maybe even loose intent right now.

本：这和之前的方式略有不同，因为广告匹配的是网页内容，而不是用户明确表达的意图。他们尽量让广告与页面内容相融合。但当你浏览某些内容时，通常也意味着你对相关事物可能存在未来意图，甚至可能有一些即时的潜在意图。

David: And we’ve got this existing pool of advertisers in our system.

大卫：并且我们已经有了现成的广告客户群体。

Ben: And their ads.

本：以及他们投放的广告。

David: And their ads in the system.

大卫：这些广告都已经存在于系统中。

Ben: We could literally just run the same ads.

本：我们完全可以直接投放这些广告。

David: We could run the same ads on webpages.

大卫：直接把这些广告投放到网页上去。

In February of 2003, they have this idea. Google is still massively inventory-constrained for serving ads. There’s way more demand from advertisers to be serving their ads against queries than there are query supply in the system, so to speak.

2003年2月，他们萌生了这个想法。当时谷歌广告的库存非常紧张，广告主希望投放广告的需求远远超过了实际搜索查询的供应量。

Ben: Which is why the auction works. If you had way more searches, then everybody would just be bidding, one and two cents on everything all the time and winning.

本：这也正是拍卖模式能奏效的原因。如果搜索供应量远远多于需求，每个人都会以一两分钱随便竞价，并且都能赢得广告位。

David: You always want to be supply constrained as a business. Legendary Google engineer Jeff Dean builds AdSense in six weeks. The whole system.

大卫：作为一门生意，你总希望供应端是受限的。谷歌的传奇工程师杰夫·迪恩（Jeff Dean）在短短六周内就开发出了AdSense系统的整个框架。

Ben: Of course he does.

本：当然，这就是他的风格。

David: They’re great stories. They launch it first on Google groups, and then they want to test it on true third-party websites to see how this works. As they’re testing it, what they decide to do is, oh, we’ll just buy display ad space on these other publishers. Rather than running display ads, we’ll serve it however they need to serve it. But we’ll effectively serve a display ad that is just a window into the text ads of AdWords ads that we’re serving onto that page.

大卫：这些故事真是精彩。他们首先在Google Groups上进行了发布，之后又想在真正的第三方网站上测试这一模式的效果。测试过程中，他们决定干脆直接购买其他发布商的展示广告位。但他们实际展示的并非传统展示广告，而是通过展示广告的形式来投放AdWords的文字广告。

Ben: I remember seeing these. For the longest time when a publisher-enabled Google AdSense, you get what looked like search results just three across in a banner.

本：我记得见过这些广告。在很长一段时间里，当发布商启用Google AdSense时，展现出来的广告看起来就像一排横幅里的三条搜索结果一样。

David: Exactly. That’s what AdSense was in the beginning. Their favorite website for testing, this was the website howstuffworks.com, because all of the pages on HowStuffWorks, it turned out were high intent, highly commercializable AdWords pages for AdWords queries. If you reverse engineered the ad search queries that would’ve run AdWords against them, they were great pages.

大卫：没错，最初的AdSense就是这样运作的。他们最喜欢用于测试的网站是howstuffworks.com，因为这个网站上的所有页面实际上都具有高度明确的用户意图，非常适合将AdWords广告商业化。如果你反向推导出适合投放到这些页面上的搜索关键词，它们都是极佳的广告页面。

Susan Wojcicki came in as the product manager for this into the process, and it becomes another big business for Google. Much lower margin than their own first-party AdWords business, but adds hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue to Google off the bat.

苏珊·沃西基（Susan Wojcicki）后来作为产品经理加入了这一过程，AdSense很快成为谷歌的另一项重要业务。尽管利润率远低于谷歌自家的AdWords搜索业务，但它很快为谷歌带来了数亿美元的收入。

Ben: I’ve seen different estimates from different points in time, sometimes that they share 67% of revenue, sometimes that they share 80% of revenue. But the right way to think about it is most of the revenue on a click in Google AdSense actually goes to the website publisher. Google takes the smaller part as their spiff.

本：我看到过不同时间点的各种估计，有时候谷歌将67%的收入分享给发布商，有时候这个比例高达80%。但更合适的理解是，在Google AdSense中每一次点击带来的收入，大部分实际上都给了网站发布者。谷歌自己只拿相对较小的一部分作为回报。

David: That’s right.

大卫：没错。

Ben: Whereas if you actually own the search results page and you are running first-party ads, you get 100%.

本：相比之下，如果你自己拥有搜索结果页面并直接投放自家广告，那你就可以获得100%的收入。

David: But it’s very similar to the portal ad deals that they were doing with AOL and others of sharing revenue with the publisher. It’s the same model.

大卫：不过这种模式其实和他们早期与AOL以及其他门户网站进行的广告合作模式类似，也都是与发布方共享收入的模式。

Ben: That’s a great point. It’s someone else’s traffic. The net result of this, by the way, of the AdSense launch, Google has had a troubled dance over the years back and forth with publishers. Are they good for publishers? Are they bad for publishers? What does it mean for the news industry? Blah-blah-blah.

本：这是个很好的观察。毕竟这流量是别人的。顺便说一句，AdSense的推出后，谷歌与发布商之间多年来关系一直反反复复，复杂微妙。谷歌对发布商究竟是利是弊？这对新闻行业意味着什么？诸如此类的问题一直争论不休。

Right in this moment, when they launch AdSense, publishers, and especially small ones, love them. I’m making content on the Internet and all I have to do is drop in some HTML and Google just starts depositing money in my bank account. This is amazing.

但就在推出AdSense的那个时刻，发布商，尤其是小型发布商非常喜欢谷歌。对他们来说，我只需要在网上发布内容，然后插入一些简单的HTML代码，谷歌就开始直接把钱打入我的账户。这种感觉简直太棒了。

David: Think about this, too. This is the precursor to the YouTube business model for creators. Oh wait, you mean I get to just create content and put it on YouTube, and Google deposits money in my account? This is the first version of that.

大卫：再仔细想想，这其实正是后来YouTube创作者模式的雏形。等等，你的意思是我只要创作内容并放到YouTube上，谷歌就会自动给我汇款吗？AdSense正是这种模式的最早版本。

非常合理的推理。

Ben: An ad network running on a thing that you make is a beautiful thing for a small business owner.

本：对小企业主来说，在自己创造的内容上运行一个广告网络，简直是件美妙的事情。

David: Totally, and with all the liquidity of advertisers of Google. They launched this thing. Jeff codes it up the beginning of 2003, call it end of Q1 2003. They launched AdSense. By the end of the year, just a few months later, it’s doing over \$1 million dollars a day in revenue.

大卫：完全同意，而且这一切还得益于谷歌庞大的广告主资源。他们推出AdSense后，杰夫在2003年初，大约第一季度末完成了所有代码工作并发布了这个产品。仅仅几个月后，到2003年底，每天收入就已经超过了100万美元。

Ben: That’s crazy. It’s just crazy how fast this grew. We’re zoomed in on AdSense right now, but we’re still pre-IPO here. The rest of the business is still very much developing.

本：这速度简直令人难以置信。目前我们聚焦的是AdSense，但此时谷歌还没有上市。公司的其他业务也仍在高速发展中。

It’s worth bouncing around to a few different parts of Google to share some updates that didn’t fit into the story arc along the way. One is 20% time is happening. People are launching all sorts of fun side projects.

这里也值得快速提一下谷歌其他几个不同方面的发展动态，虽然这些和当前叙述的主线故事不太吻合。比如当时流行的20%自由时间（20% Time），员工们在此期间启动了各种有趣的个人项目。

There’s Google Labs, which is this really great way that they’re starting to surface this stuff to users. Google News comes out of this. It is legitimately someone’s actual 20% time their own personal motivations. Actually, particularly after September 11th, there’s this super strong hunger for people to have a way to get rapidly updating…

当时还有Google Labs（谷歌实验室），这是谷歌用于向用户展示这些创新项目的极佳方式之一。谷歌新闻（Google News）就是这样一个典型项目。它确实出自员工在20%自由时间的个人兴趣项目，尤其是在9·11事件之后，人们对能够实时快速获取……

David: News on a topic.

大卫：……特定话题新闻的需求格外强烈。

Ben: Yes.

本：没错。

David: You couldn’t get that before. You had to go to cnn.com.

大卫：以前根本做不到这一点。你只能直接打开cnn.com去看新闻。

Ben: So Google News is starting to really get some traction. Speaking of disputes with publishers, that is starting to heat up as well.

本：所以谷歌新闻开始迅速获得关注。当然，提到谷歌和出版商之间的纠纷，这个时候也逐渐开始升温了。

The second thing is their organic search ranking is really developing. What started as just PageRank plus then using the anchor text, they’re starting to use all sorts of things. Later by 2007, they were using 200 different pieces of information to determine the ranking on a query.

其次是他们的自然搜索排名算法也在快速发展。最初只是基于PageRank和锚文本，但后来开始引入更多因素。到2007年时，谷歌在评估搜索结果排名时，已经综合使用了超过200个不同的信息因素。

Early on, I know some of these early signals included data that they were actually feeding back from observing traffic. There’s this data network effect that’s starting to happen where more people use Google, and that makes Google better (a) on the whole, so they can understand, oh, if someone keeps bouncing off that page every time this query is searched, then clearly that thing doesn’t belong.

早期，我知道他们使用的一些信号就包括对用户流量行为的反馈数据。这时已经出现了“数据网络效应”，即使用谷歌的人越多，谷歌的搜索效果也就越好。整体上，它能帮助谷歌理解用户行为，比如，当某个查询的搜索结果中有个页面总被用户快速关闭，很明显那个页面的内容就不合适。

David: We’re doing a bad job on this query.

大卫：说明这个搜索查询，我们做得还不够好。

Ben: Or (b) personalization. What can we learn about you from a whole bunch of things that you’ve done in the past? Now, without spoiling too much of the future, there’s not a strong reason to be logged into Google yet, so personalization only works so well, but once Google accounts become a thing, then that’ll really take off.

本：另外还有个性化方面的信息。我们能从你之前的大量行为中了解到什么？当然，这里我不想剧透太多未来的内容，但当时用户还没有特别强烈的动机登录谷歌账号，所以个性化的效果有限。但一旦谷歌账户体系真正建立起来，个性化搜索的效果将非常明显。

It’s worth knowing, and I really didn’t know this, PageRank really is the thing that got Google going, but that part of the algorithm isn’t really the thing that’s the main differentiable asset today.

值得一提的是，我之前也没意识到这一点：PageRank确实帮助谷歌取得了最初的成功，但在今天，这个算法本身并不再是谷歌真正的核心竞争优势了。

David: It was just the start. I think this is also a major difference in mindset of Larry and Sergey and Google versus the other search providers. Everybody else just said, oh, we’ve got our insight. Okay, great. We’re done. We solved search. Google has never said we solved search.

大卫：这仅仅是个开始。我认为，这其实也是拉里、谢尔盖以及整个谷歌公司与其他搜索公司之间的一个重要思维差异。其他公司可能会说：“我们找到了一些创新，行了，我们已经解决搜索问题了。”但谷歌从来不认为自己已经彻底解决了搜索问题。

Ben: And they just keep investing and investing and investing. I think (a) they believe search is going to be bigger than anyone could have realized, but (b) they had the insight of the exponential curve of content on the Internet is growing faster than Google will ever be able to index it all or come up with clever strategies to sort it all. It’s so dynamically changing that we’ll actually never catch up. So we need to constantly be investing to approximate good results because we’ll actually never have optimal results.

本：他们持续不断地投入大量资源。我觉得，一方面他们认为搜索的规模会远超任何人的想象；另一方面，他们也洞察到，互联网上内容的指数级增长速度远快于谷歌能完全抓取或巧妙排序的能力。互联网内容每天都在快速变化，我们永远无法真正完全赶上，因此必须持续不断地投入资源，才能无限逼近更好的搜索结果，即使永远无法达到绝对的最佳结果。

David: Totally.

大卫：完全同意。

Ben: And then the third big thing that kept developing is their infrastructure. They put so much over these years into building out all the hardware that we were talking about. A ton of software stuff.

本：然后，第三个不断发展的重要领域是基础设施建设。这些年来，谷歌在硬件设施上投入巨大，也开发了大量的软件设施。

David: And that hardware stuff shifted from, ooh, we’re being really entrepreneurial (shall we say) and how we use commodity hardware cheaply, to oh, we’re designing our own data centers.

大卫：硬件基础设施的建设也发生了转变，从最初的“我们以低成本、创业式的方式利用商用硬件”，逐渐演变成“我们自己设计并构建专门的数据中心”。

Ben: Absolutely. And we’re designing our own file systems with GFS, or I think we’ll talk about a lot of it in the next episode, but very real system-level software that is pioneering.

本：完全正确。同时我们还设计了自有的文件系统（GFS，Google File System）。接下来我们可能会在下一集中详细讨论，但这些都是谷歌在系统级软件方面的重大突破和创新。

David: Bigtable, MapReduce, et cetera.

大卫：比如Bigtable、MapReduce等技术。

Ben: Yup. That’s on top of the clever search software that they’re writing for things like synonyms. People don’t pay that much attention to this, but synonym matching is actually a crucial part of getting search right.

本：没错，这还不包括他们为搜索研发的其他精妙的软件，比如同义词匹配。人们通常不会特别关注这个，但同义词匹配实际上对于做好搜索至关重要。

If you’re searching for ‘cat’ and there’s a whole incredibly relevant page about kittens and you don’t have a good way to understand synonyms, then you’re never going to surface it even though it might be incredibly relevant.

比如，如果你搜索的是“cat”（猫），而有个页面高度相关，但内容都是关于“kitten”（小猫），如果搜索引擎不能很好地理解这两个词是同义或近义的关系，那么即便那个页面非常相关，也永远不会出现在搜索结果中。

Google had all these little tricks like realizing, oh wait, when users are searching for cool cat pictures and then they change cat to kitten, and that happens a lot, we can infer that that is actually a synonym. Then we can develop our own constantly updating synonym dictionary in real time, which will make our search results better. And they have a thousand of these things. They’re just pushing and pushing and pushing.

谷歌当时开发了许多类似的小技巧，比如他们观察到，当用户搜索“cool cat pictures”（酷猫图片）后经常又将搜索词改成“kitten”，于是他们就能推断出“cat”和“kitten”其实是同义或近义的。基于这样的观察，谷歌能够实时更新自己的同义词词典，使搜索结果更准确。他们开发了成千上万类似的技术，不断地推动搜索质量提升。

We’re finishing out 2003 here. They’re effectively never capital-constrained from this point on. They can always fund every idea that they have. The business has flipped from one, that pre-June of 2002-ish they had to make trade-offs, and after (call it) the end of 2002, there are no more trade-offs ever. They always have the cash for every single thing they want to do.

到2003年底，谷歌从此再也没有资金限制的问题。他们总能为任何一个新想法提供资金。2002年6月之前，他们还不得不权衡取舍，但从2002年底之后，他们再也不用担心资金问题了。他们有足够的钱去做任何他们想做的事情。

David: We talked about 2002 and the \$440 million of revenue, and the \$185 million of profits. 2003, that explodes to \$1.5 billion in revenue and almost \$350 million in operating income.

大卫：我们之前提到过2002年谷歌的收入为4.4亿美元，利润为1.85亿美元。而到了2003年，这个数字暴涨至收入15亿美元，运营利润接近3.5亿美元。

Ben: What was operating income the year before?

本：前一年的运营利润是多少来着？

David: \$185 million.

大卫：1.85亿美元。

Ben: So went from \$185 million to \$350 million in one year.

本：也就是说，仅仅一年间，利润就从1.85亿美元涨到了3.5亿美元。

David: Yup, in one year. Some of you might be listening and be like, well wait a minute. It sounds like their margins got a lot worse.

大卫：没错，就一年时间。可能有些人听到这里会想，等等，这听起来好像他们的利润率大幅下降了。

Ben: Depending on your accounting, it did. You get to keep all the money from AdWords, and you only get to keep 20% of the money from AdSense.

本：根据不同的会计方法，确实是这样。因为来自AdWords的收入全部归自己，而来自AdSense的收入只能留下约20%。

David: Adsense is the answer there. Adsense added \$0.5 billion in 2003 at much lower margin, but was awesome.

大卫：答案就在AdSense业务上。AdSense在2003年带来了额外的5亿美元收入，尽管利润率较低，但这项业务依然非常成功。

Ben: As best we can understand it, Google AdWords stayed an 85% gross margin business.

本：根据我们能掌握的信息，谷歌的AdWords业务一直维持着85%左右的高毛利率。

David: Incredible. Okay, so that takes us to the last chapter of our story today in 2004, which is the, I think today thought of as famous Google IPO?

大卫：真是惊人。那么，这就带我们进入今天故事的最后一章——2004年。谷歌进行了一次IPO，也就是如今人们津津乐道的“著名谷歌IPO”。

Ben: And today thought of as successful,

本：如今人们普遍认为它很成功。

David: Today, thought of as yes, successful IPO. At the time, infamous and horribly unsuccessful Google IPO of 2004. I don’t think other than Microsoft, there had ever been another company like this, where there was no good reason for Google to go public. It was wildly profitable, generating plenty of cash, did not need the investment money.

大卫：没错，如今普遍认为这是一次成功的IPO。但当时，这场2004年的IPO被视为臭名昭著且极不成功的IPO。除了微软，我想历史上还没有第二家公司像谷歌这样，其实根本没有必要上市。他们当时利润极高，现金流充足，完全不需要外部的投资资金。

Ben: I assume they’ve never spent their IPO proceeds.

本：我估计谷歌根本没有真正花掉IPO所募集到的钱。

David: No, of course not. They’ve never not been wildly, wildly, wildly profitable. Actually, even more so than Microsoft, Google had a really, really good reason not to go public, which was Microsoft. As we alluded to, there was desperate paranoia in the company of we can’t let Microsoft. They are the actual front door to the Internet for all of our users through Internet Explorer.

大卫：当然没有。他们从来都是极度、极度、极度盈利的。实际上，谷歌比微软更加有理由不去上市，而这个理由正是微软。正如我们之前提到的，公司内部一直弥漫着强烈的焦虑：我们绝不能让微软知道我们赚了这么多钱。毕竟，他们通过Internet Explorer控制着几乎所有用户通向互联网的入口。

Ben: Who actually has the capital to fight us. They have no idea what a good business this is.

本：而且微软是真正有足够资金与我们竞争的公司。他们当时还没意识到搜索是个多么赚钱的生意。

David: We can’t let them know how good this is. Fortunately, I guess for the investing public, and unfortunately for Google, the Jobs Act had not been passed yet, so the 500 shareholder rule was still in effect for companies in the US, which was that if you crossed the threshold of having 500 distinct shareholders for your company, you had to report your financials publicly as if you are a public company.

大卫：我们绝对不能让他们知道这门生意的价值。不过，对投资者来说幸运、对谷歌来说不幸的是，当时《乔布斯法案》（Jobs Act）还未通过，因此美国仍然执行着“500名股东规则”。这条规定是，如果你的公司拥有超过500名股东，你就必须公开披露财务信息，就像上市公司一样。

Ben: You know, David? I read all this too. They had venture capital backers. They had to go public. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins are not going to be just sitting there on their hands like, we love being private shareholders forever.

本：大卫，我也读到了相关的内容。他们背后有风险投资基金的支持，必须得上市才行。红杉资本（Sequoia）和凯鹏华盈（Kleiner Perkins）不可能一直默默地坐在那里说，“我们乐意永远当私营股东”。

David: We like dividends.

大卫：“我们喜欢分红”（显然不是VC的逻辑）。

Ben: In 2003, in these funds that just went through the dot-com crash, so most of their other companies got wiped out. It’s not like they’re the venture capital funds of today that come up with all these clever strategies to look like more permanent vehicles and offer liquidity. These were closed end freaking funds that need to get their money out.

本：而且当时是2003年，这些基金刚刚经历了互联网泡沫的破裂，其他大部分投资的公司都已经倒闭了。他们不像今天的风险投资基金，可以想出各种巧妙的策略，让基金看起来像永久型资金并提供流动性。当时的这些基金都是封闭式基金，必须套现退出。

David: Well I think the question is, did Larry and Sergey care about that? Whether they did or didn’t, the 500 shareholder rule was a forcing function. But obviously the VCs…

大卫：我想关键问题是，拉里和谢尔盖会在乎这些吗？不管他们在不在乎，“500名股东规则”终究是迫使他们上市的重要原因。当然，风险投资基金的因素也不容忽视……

Ben: But to your point, I guess the VCs didn’t control the board. Larry and Sergey controlled the company.

本：但如你所说，我想风投并没有真正控制董事会。拉里和谢尔盖才是掌控公司的那两个人。

David: Exactly. Just like Bill, Paul, and Microsoft. It was extremely rare that because Google never needed to raise VC money after the Series A, Larry and Sergey together with the employees in the option pool, had controlled the majority of the votes in the company.

大卫：没错。这跟比尔·盖茨和保罗·艾伦在微软的情况非常相似。谷歌自从A轮融资之后再也没需要过风投资金，这种情况极为罕见。拉里、谢尔盖以及员工的期权池，加在一起实际控制了公司大部分的投票权。

Ben: Meta, Google, Microsoft, there’s something correlated between founder control and incredibly good capital efficiency in a business. Interesting.

本：Meta（脸书母公司）、谷歌、微软，这些公司创始人的控制权与公司极高的资本效率之间似乎存在某种关联，这一点非常有趣。

David: Regardless, this is all academic because truly the 500 shareholder rule would’ve required them to disclose their financials anyway. So might as well go public and make the VCs happy, I guess. And employees too. There was clearly pent-up employee demand, and there weren’t the same liquidity markets that there is today.

大卫：不管怎样，这些现在都只是学术讨论，因为500名股东规则已经迫使他们必须公开财务数据了。既然如此，不如顺势上市，让风投满意一下吧。当然，还有员工们。当时员工对流动性的需求也非常强烈，而那时候又不像现在拥有这么完善的股权流动市场。

Ben: David, put four underlines under that. This IPO made half of the 2000 people who worked at Google millionaires.

本：大卫，这里我得强调一下：这次IPO让谷歌当时约2000名员工中的一半都成了百万富翁。

David: Yes. There’s a lot of interest in going public. As we get to the end of 2003, beginning of 2004, they know they’re going to cross the threshold during 2004. They’re going to have to go public. They start interviewing investment banks.

大卫：没错。上市的动力确实非常强烈。2003年底到2004年初，谷歌清楚地意识到他们在2004年必然会突破500股东的门槛，因此不得不上市了。他们开始了与投资银行的接触和面谈。

Larry and Sergey really don’t want to do this. They don’t like anything about the process. They don’t like the IPO pops. They don’t like how much money the banks make, et cetera. They’re interviewing banks.

拉里和谢尔盖其实非常不愿意做这件事。他们完全不喜欢IPO的流程，也讨厌IPO后的股价暴涨，更不喜欢投资银行能从中赚取那么多的佣金。因此，他们开始谨慎地与各家银行进行面谈。

Ben: And we should say this IPO pop thing, it sounds good. It’s like a phrase that the investment banking community invented to make it sound like a good thing.

本：我们应该说明一下，“IPO首日大涨”（IPO pop）听起来似乎很好，但实际上这是投资银行界创造出来的一个术语，让这件事听起来是好事。

A pop is a bad thing for existing shareholders. It means that in the IPO, you incorrectly priced it too low, and then within one day upside that should have, or really is yours because it happened in all the intrinsic value was built all over these years, goes to the people who had access to buy your IPO shares, the investment bank’s clients, and then they get this nice little pop on day one and you were mispriced. That is the problem that a lot of people try to solve for in different ways.

对现有股东来说，这个首日大涨其实是件坏事。它意味着你的IPO定价过低了，因此本来应属于你的上涨空间（实际上这些价值是在公司多年发展中积累的）被那些能获得IPO股份的人，即投资银行的客户们，在一天内轻易地获取了。他们在首日就获得了一个丰厚的涨幅，而你却定价失误了。这是很多人试图用各种方式解决的问题。

David: During the IPO process, they learn from Bill Hambrecht of WR Hambrecht, a boutique investment bank in San Francisco, who really doesn’t have the same incentives that the big banks in New York have with their clients, that actually there is an alternative way to price your IPO. Something called a Dutch auction IPO process, which is this arcane thing that have been done before.

大卫：在IPO过程中，他们从旧金山一家精品投行WR Hambrecht的创始人比尔·汉布雷希特（Bill Hambrecht）那里了解到另一种IPO定价方法。这家投行和纽约的大型投行不同，没有那么多客户利益的复杂考量。这种方法就是所谓的“荷兰式拍卖”（Dutch auction），虽然古老且不常用，但历史上确实有人用过。

Ben: How do you do good price discovery?

本：如何准确发现价格呢？

David: Well, the optimal way to do this is a reverse auction where you start the bidding high and you come down in price incrementally until you reach a clearing price where the entire offering size is spoken for with bids at that price. You can imagine just how much this appeals to Larry and Sergey and Google.

大卫：最理想的方式就是一种逆向拍卖，即先从较高的价格开始竞价，然后逐步降低价格，直到达到一个“出清价格”（clearing price），此时整个发行规模都以这个价格被竞拍完成。你可以想象这种方法对拉里、谢尔盖和谷歌的吸引力有多大。

Ben: Oh my God. Sounds perfect. They’re like, this is the whole business. This is what we do, anyway. This is delightful.

本：天啊，简直完美。他们的反应是：“这就是我们整个商业模式的核心啊！我们本来就是做这个的，太妙了。”

David: There’s this legend that Eric Schmidt talks about of they also got a letter from a little old lady, that hearing Google is about to go public, and really hoping she could get it, and that the small retail investor would’ve access too, and that pulled at their heartstrings. I’m sure that’s true, too, but you can see why this appeals.

大卫：还有个传闻，据埃里克·施密特（Eric Schmidt）说，他们当时收到过一位老太太的来信，说她听说谷歌准备上市，很希望自己和普通小投资者也能买到谷歌的股票，这封信打动了他们。我相信这是真的，但你也能理解为何这种方法对谷歌很有吸引力。

Ben: In a vacuum, this sounds perfect and everyone should do it. Theoretically, this is also what the investment banker, what algorithm are they actually running? It should be something like this. They’re meeting with clients, they’re picking up the phone. Are you in at this price? Are you in? How much would you want at that price? You should be running this algorithm in a loose human way anyway.

本：理论上讲，这听起来非常理想，每家公司都应该这么做。实际上投资银行在承销IPO时本来就应该运行这样的“算法”：他们和客户见面，打电话询问：“你会在这个价格认购吗？你愿意认购多少？” 本来这个过程就是以人为载体在松散地运行类似的算法。

David: Now, they’re worried about pricing and they’re worried about the IPO mechanism. They’re also really worried about losing control. Because once they go public, even though they have control of the company now as a private company, the employee shares are captive. People are going to start selling. Now, all of a sudden the public markets are going to control a lot more of the company. There’s risk that Larry and Sergey might collectively lose control of the company here.

大卫：此外，谷歌不仅担心定价和IPO的机制，也非常担忧失去对公司的控制权。因为一旦公司上市，即便他们在私营公司阶段牢牢掌握了控制权，员工股份也会逐渐进入流通市场。员工们会开始出售股票，公众市场很快会拥有更多的公司股份，这使拉里和谢尔盖面临着可能失去对公司控制权的风险。

Ben: So they do a thing that no one else in the technology industry does, and Google has been swearing up and down that they’re not a media company. Then they look to the media companies and they go, wait a minute. When the media companies need to separate editorial control and have sort of family stewardship of editorial control, but they want to let the shareholders come in and they don’t want the business to be able to affect editorial too much, they’ve got this great dual class structure. We are a tech company.

本：于是他们做了一件在当时科技行业从未有过的事情。谷歌一直信誓旦旦地强调自己不是媒体公司，但此刻他们却向媒体公司取经：“等等，媒体公司经常需要将编辑控制权与股东经济利益分离，比如一些家族掌控的媒体公司，他们为了保证对编辑内容的长期控制，采取了这种双重股权结构（dual class structure）。我们是科技公司，或许也能效仿一下？”

David: Where the families of the New York Times company or Dow Jones back then, or basically all the major newspaper companies, the original family owners had super voting shares that ensured that collectively the family would retain majority voting control over the company even if they lost economic control. Larry and Sergey decide, oh great. We’re going to do a dual class share structure for Google too.

大卫：比如《纽约时报》、道琼斯等大媒体公司，当初创始的家族都持有超级投票权股票（super voting shares），确保即便家族失去经济控制权，他们仍能保留公司大部分的投票控制权。于是拉里和谢尔盖决定：“太好了，我们也要为谷歌设置这种双重股权结构。”

Ben: Which today is super common.

本：当然如今这种结构已经非常普遍了。

David: But Google started it. Google was the first tech company to do this. Today, it’s everybody. It’s Facebook/Meta, Alibaba, Shopify, Spotify, Coinbase, Airbnb, Zoom, Datadog, every major IPO since Google. Every major tech IPO has had this. Famously, Snapchat even pushed the envelope so far when they IPO’d the public shares have no votes. it’s not even just super voting. It’s like, oh you public, you get no votes whatsoever.

大卫：但这一切都是从谷歌开始的。谷歌是首家采取这种结构的科技公司。如今每家公司都在效仿，比如Facebook/Meta、阿里巴巴、Shopify、Spotify、Coinbase、Airbnb、Zoom、Datadog等等，几乎谷歌之后的每一次重大科技公司IPO都采用了双重股权结构。Snapchat甚至走得更远，他们上市时，公众股东持有的股票完全没有投票权，不只是超级投票权的问题，而是公众股东根本没有任何投票权。

Ben: It’s like being a Green Bay Packers shareholder.

本：就像是成为绿湾包装工队（Green Bay Packers，美式橄榄球队）的股东一样，只能拥有股份，但没有任何控制权。

David: Exactly. Google pioneered all of this, which I think is why in retrospect this IPO is viewed as a famous success.

大卫：没错，这种结构完全是由谷歌率先开创的，这也是为什么回过头看，谷歌的IPO被视为一次经典的成功案例。

Ben: Okay, they do the Dutch auction.

本：好，接下来他们进行了荷兰式拍卖IPO。

David: In practice, it does not go well.

大卫：但实际操作起来却并不顺利。

Ben: But why? The numbers on this are pretty crazy. They are initially floating in the Dutch auction using the software. By the way, Google software engineers wrote the software.

本：但为什么呢？这个IPO的数字本身就很夸张。一开始，他们用荷兰式拍卖的方式确定价格，竟然用的是自己开发的软件。顺便一提，这套软件是谷歌自己的工程师写的。

David: I know. Amazing.

大卫：我知道，这真是太神奇了。

Ben: Isn’t this crazy? And I don’t think it’s like Google owned, I think they were collaborating with the investment bank. It’s this weird joint partnership that they’re doing where it’s Google engineers, but it’s this investment bank running the process. They’re trying to figure out where in the range between \$108 a share and \$135 a share should we price? Will it be fully subscribed? Well, the actual price where they end up filling the order is at \$85 a share.

本：是不是太疯狂了？而且我认为这套软件不完全是谷歌自己拥有的，而是与投行合作的一种奇特的联合模式：软件是谷歌工程师开发的，但拍卖过程由投行负责。最初他们给出的价格区间是每股108到135美元之间，但最终真正确定的价格却只有每股85美元。

David: Which gives Google a \$23 billion market cap at IPO.

大卫：这样算下来，谷歌IPO时的市值为230亿美元。

Ben: And they raise \$1.7 billion. This is great. It’s a \$1.7 billion raise, \$23 billion market cap that looks like an astronomically high multiple that the company’s been given. So you should walk away and say they really maximized value there. They probably were just wrong in that initial range that they were looking for, \$108 a share to \$135, and it only priced at \$85. Well trust the mechanism. I guess it’s only actually worth \$85 a share.

本：他们在IPO中筹集了17亿美元。这看起来相当不错：17亿美元融资、230亿美元市值，看似是一个非常高的估值倍数。似乎他们的确实现了价值最大化。也许只是他们最初定的区间（108-135美元）不对，最终的85美元才是真正合理的价格吧。你会想：“好吧，就相信市场机制吧，也许公司实际的价值真的只有每股85美元。”

David: Nope. Pops to \$100 on closing of trading the very same day.

大卫：但事实并非如此。当日收盘价就涨到了每股100美元。

Ben: Eighteen percent pop day one. Then by the end of the very next year, 16 months later, is almost a 5x. This thing was not at all priced correctly.

本：首日上涨18%。而且仅仅过了16个月，到次年年底时，股价几乎翻了5倍。显然，当初的IPO定价根本没有定对。

David: There’s a reason why when you look at the legacy of the Google IPO, dual class share structure, great idea. Everybody does it. Dutch auction IPO, not a great idea. Nobody has done it since.

大卫：这也解释了为何回顾谷歌IPO时，双重股权结构被视为是个伟大的想法，从此每家公司都效仿；而荷兰式拍卖IPO却被认为不是个好主意，从那之后再也没有公司这么做过。

Ben: It doubled within the first few months. It’s great PR, right? The stock’s doing well, people think high of your company. That’s good for all sorts of reasons. But this did absolutely zero for making sure that the company doesn’t leave money on the table.

本：几个月内股价就翻了一倍。当然从公关的角度，这看起来很棒：股票表现良好，公众对公司评价很高，各种方面都受益。但实际上，这种IPO定价方式完全没能避免公司把本应属于自己的价值拱手让给市场。

David: So funny. It’s all a footnote of history anyway because what’s a few percentage points between friends when the company would go to over \$2 trillion today as we’re recording this or roughly 100x the market cap when it IPO’d.

大卫：说起来很有趣，不过这也都是历史的小插曲而已。当公司如今（我们录制这期节目时）的市值已经超过2万亿美元时，相较于IPO时230亿美元的市值，增长了差不多100倍，朋友之间那点百分之几的差别又算得了什么呢？

Ben: And David, you’re not counting dividends.

本：而且大卫，你这还没把期间的股息算进去呢。

David: Not counting dividends, of course.

大卫：是啊，当然还没算股息呢。

Ben: You reinvested dividends, you’d make significantly more than 100x since IPO,

本：如果你一直再投资股息，从IPO到现在，你的回报将远远超过100倍。

David: Well after our Steve Balmer interview, never going to not count dividends again. But to preview a little bit the rest of the series, Google’s a \$2.1 (call it) trillion market cap company today, roughly 100x since the IPO. Amazingly, I’m going to ask, do I know you know, what Google/Alphabet’s price-to-earnings ratio is right now?

大卫：经过我们与史蒂夫·鲍尔默的访谈之后，再也不会忘记计算股息了。稍微预告一下我们系列节目的后续内容，谷歌如今的市值约为2.1万亿美元，大约是IPO时的100倍。你知道现在Google（Alphabet）的市盈率是多少吗？

Ben: Ooh baby, I do know, because I was just looking this up. It is an all-time low.

本：我确实知道，因为我刚刚查过。谷歌目前的市盈率是历史新低。

David: Twenty.

大卫：20倍。

Ben: Twenty price earnings.

本：对，20倍市盈率。

David: And roughly 6x revenue. Compare that to its peer companies. Amazon’s PE is 35, Microsoft is 37, NVIDIA is 46, Apple is 30, and Meta is 27. Google/Alphabet is down at 20. It’s not like Alphabet’s not growing revenue. They’re growing revenue just as fast, if not faster than all of those companies except NVIDIA. Something is going on here.

大卫：而且市值大约是收入的6倍。与同行公司相比，亚马逊的市盈率是35倍，微软37倍，英伟达46倍，苹果30倍，Meta 27倍。只有谷歌（Alphabet）跌到了20倍。Alphabet并不是没有增长，他们的收入增速和这些公司相比一样快，甚至除了英伟达之外可能更快。那么这中间一定出了什么问题。

Ben: This price sure seems to reflect that even though revenue is growing nicely and margins are quite high, somebody, and that somebody is mister market thinks the future is a lot bleaker than they do for those other companies.

本：这样的估值明显说明，尽管收入增长强劲、利润率也很高，但市场先生（Mr. Market）显然认为谷歌的未来比其他公司更暗淡。

David: Nevermind that Google invented AI and published the Transformer paper.

大卫：尽管谷歌发明了AI领域著名的Transformer技术并发表了相关论文（Attention is All You Need）。

Ben: Oh, we’ll get to it all. No spoilers, okay?

本：哦，这些我们以后都会详细讲到。现在先别剧透了，好吗？

David: No spoilers, okay. That’s where we’re going to leave Google for part one. But one more little, little start of a story to tease you with for part two next time. The same month in April of 2004 when Google files its S-1 for its IPO, Google does an unexpected product launch on April Fool’s Day, which really was not a good idea because Google had a history of fake April Fool’s joke announcements.

大卫：好，不剧透了。这就是我们第一部分要讲的谷歌故事。不过在结束之前，稍微预告一下下一集的故事。2004年4月，谷歌提交了IPO的S-1招股书。同一个月，他们在愚人节发布了一款令人意想不到的产品，这其实不是个好主意，因为谷歌过去经常在愚人节发布假消息。

Ben: But if you have one that sounds ridiculous, don’t launch on an April Fool’s day because people will think it’s a joke.

本：所以如果你发布一款听起来匪夷所思的产品，千万别选在愚人节，因为人们会认为这是个玩笑。

David: Because the product they launch actually sounds way too good to be true. Web-based email from Google with one gigabyte of free storage for every single user. Now to put that in context, Yahoo and Hotmail at the time had two megabytes of free storage per user.

大卫：而谷歌当天发布的这款产品听起来真的好到让人难以置信。这是一款谷歌推出的网页端电子邮件服务，每个用户免费提供1GB的存储空间。对比一下背景，当时雅虎邮箱和Hotmail邮箱每个用户只提供2MB的免费空间。

Ben: I think it was 20x the next best is the stat that I read on Gmail.

本：据我读到的资料，Gmail提供的空间是当时其他邮箱的20倍以上。

David: And it comes with Google search baked in across all of your emails. It’s entirely web-based, runs in your browser anytime, anywhere. It’s the greatest April Fool’s gift to internet users everywhere that Google could provide here. The question though is why did they do this knowing what we now know about Google?

大卫：而且邮箱内置了谷歌搜索功能，完全基于网页端，可以随时随地在浏览器中使用。这简直是谷歌送给所有互联网用户的最好的愚人节礼物。那么问题来了，既然我们如今知道了谷歌的业务逻辑，他们为什么要做这样的产品呢？

Ben: David, wouldn’t it be great if there was a reason, a really compelling reason for someone to be logged into Google? And wouldn’t it be great if we could just attach more things to a user’s life that could be entry points to Google search and the greatest business of all time, search ads?

本：大卫，如果能有个非常充分的理由让用户始终保持登录谷歌账户，岂不是很好？如果我们能让用户生活的方方面面都与谷歌关联起来，从而成为用户进入谷歌搜索这个史上最赚钱业务的入口，那该多好？

David: What if, Ben? What if?

大卫：如果真是这样呢，本？

Ben: Okay David, we’re going to tell the whole Gmail story as a part of chapter two, but I do have to give you one thing that is specific to this episode.

本：好吧，大卫，Gmail的完整故事我们会放到下一章讲，但现在，我必须给你讲一件和这一集内容密切相关的小事。

David: Ooh, go for it.

大卫：好啊，你讲吧。

Ben: The engineer who started Gmail, Paul Buchheit, now of course a partner at Y Combinator and actually with Bret Taylor started FriendFeed.

Ben：Gmail 的创始工程师是 Paul Buchheit，他现在当然是 Y Combinator 的合伙人，还曾和 Bret Taylor 一起创办了 FriendFeed。

David: That’s right.

David：没错。

Ben: Paul Buchheit is awesome and recently launched a new venture fund, and actually the original coiner of the term ‘don’t be evil’ at Google.

Ben：Paul Buchheit 非常厉害，最近还创立了一个新的风险基金，他其实也是 Google 里“Don’t be evil”（不作恶）这句口号的原创者。

David: That’s right.

David：确实如此。

Ben: He’s working on Gmail. It’s very early. It’s 2001. He’s been working on this thing for 2½–3 years before it launches. We’re at the very beginning of it.

Ben：他那时正在开发 Gmail，时间非常早，是 2001 年。他在 Gmail 正式发布前已经投入了两年半到三年的时间，我们说的是这个项目刚起步的时候。

David: In his 20% time.

David：是他用 20% 自由支配时间做的。

Ben: It’s a 20% project. It starts as, I’m going to look in your Unix directory at your mail, and I’m just going to treat that like the web, just the same way that we treat web pages. I’m just going to take a search box and I’m going to point it at your mail folder, and I’m going to let you search. That’s it. That’s the only functionality of what would become Gmail.

Ben：这是一个 20% 项目。起初只是这么个想法：我去你的 Unix 目录中看邮件，把它像网页一样处理。我加一个搜索框，指向你的邮件文件夹，让你可以搜索。这就是 Gmail 最早的全部功能。

The search bar is actually the first feature of Gmail, and everything else came later. As he’s playing around with this, he has this idea. Well if our core business is indexing organic results and showing some ads, maybe in addition to indexing and searching this organic results out of your mail folder, I should just go grab ads from our ad database, just display them around, and see how well the content matches.

搜索栏其实是 Gmail 的第一个功能，其他的都是后面才加的。他在玩这个系统的时候产生了个想法：既然我们公司的核心业务是索引自然结果并展示广告，那除了从你的邮件文件夹中索引内容和做搜索，我是不是也可以从我们的广告数据库里调一些广告出来，放在旁边，看匹配效果如何？

He’s showing this off internally. Larry and Sergey see it and they go, wait. Does this work on websites too? So the thing that led to AdSense…

他在公司内部展示这个项目，Larry 和 Sergey 看了后问：等一下，这能不能用在网站上？于是这个想法就发展成了 AdSense…

David: Ah, this was the beginning of the idea for AdSense.

David：啊，这就是 AdSense 概念的起点。

Ben: Was actually part of the prototyping process of Gmail.

Ben：其实那正是 Gmail 原型设计过程中的一部分。

David: Amazing. I love it. I love how you saved this to the end because you knew we were going to do the little teaser on Gmail.

David：太棒了。我喜欢你把这留到最后，说得正是时候，因为你知道我们会预告一下 Gmail 的故事。

Ben: Well, you texted me. You said, well I think we should do a little Gmail foreshadow in the…

Ben：你发短信告诉我，说我们应该在这集里稍微铺垫一下 Gmail……

David: Ah, great.

David：啊，太好了。

Ben: So thank you to Paul Buchheit for sharing the story with us.

Ben：所以要特别感谢 Paul Buchheit 跟我们分享这个故事。

David: Amazing.

David：太精彩了。

Ben: Bring it home?

Ben：要总结收官了吗？

David: That is the building of Google search business. Let’s bring this one home.

David：这就是 Google 搜索业务的构建过程。我们来收尾吧。

Ben: David, this chapter, this episode definitely feels like the building of the castle.

Ben：David，这一章，这一集确实像是城堡的建立过程。

David: Maybe next episode is going to be the building of the city around it, the state around it, the nation state around it?

David：也许下一集将是围绕它建立起的城市、邦国，甚至是一个国家的过程？

Ben: Then depending on your metaphor, is it an entire property, a platform that they’re building around it? A city? Is it a moat? But definitely this one is building the castle.

Ben：然后取决于你用什么比喻，是围绕它构建的整片资产，一个平台？一座城市？一条护城河？但无疑，这一集讲的是筑城堡。

David: We’ll have to see. Let’s go into playbook for part one. Ben, what do you got?

David：我们拭目以待。现在来讲讲第一部分的经验教训吧，Ben，你先说？

Ben: The way that I framed playbook for this one is I tried to just itemize the bullet points of why did Google work. As I think through them, if I had to lay them out to someone, starts with the best original algorithm insight.

Ben：我对这一集的经验教训的总结方式是，逐条列出为什么 Google 成功了。回顾这些点，如果要向别人解释，我会从最初的算法洞见说起。

They had the best organic relevance out there, which created the best results in order: fast, delightful clean, simple UX. They were truly dedicated to organic search. The aversion to paid inclusion, for as long as they were, served them very well. This amazing original algorithm for organic search is one.

他们拥有当时最强的自然相关性算法，输出的是最快速、最愉悦、最简洁的用户体验。他们真正专注于自然搜索，对付费插入保持警惕，这种坚持长期来看对他们非常有利。所以第一个要素是他们在自然搜索上的原创算法极为出色。

Two, best execution of the search advertising model. Once you get all those puzzle pieces in place—the auction, the switch to cost per click, factoring in relevance with click-through rate—it really is this truly beautiful system.

第二，他们对搜索广告模式的执行是最优秀的。当你把这些拼图拼好——竞价机制、按点击付费、将点击率引入相关性排序——这套系统就变得非常精妙。

Advertisers are incentivized to make their ads more relevant, and only bid on the most relevant keywords because it means they don’t have to pay as much. It’s the best ads to the right users at the right time. And to your point, David, it is literally the algorithm to maximize Google’s expected value. It is a harmonious system that they developed.

广告主有动力让自己的广告更具相关性，并只出价投放最相关的关键词，因为这样他们的成本可以更低。这实现了把最好的广告，在最合适的时间，展示给最合适的用户。正如你说的，David，这套系统从数学角度来看，确实是最大化 Google 预期收入的算法。他们打造的是一个和谐的系统。

Three, clever infrastructure advantages. They just invented stuff. They thought about problems differently and they reasoned from first principles.

第三，聪明的基础设施优势。他们自己发明东西，换个角度思考问题，从第一性原理出发进行推理。

Four, they hired the best people. Truly only world-class people for a very long time. Because when the dot-com crash happened, they could basically get anybody that they wanted there in this second half of this episode.

第四，他们聘用了最优秀的人才。很长时间里他们只招顶尖人才。因为在互联网泡沫破裂后，他们几乎可以得到他们想要的任何人，这一集后半段我们也谈到了这一点。

Paul Buchheit had a great quote when I was talking with him. I don’t even think I realized it at the time, that it was truly just the best people in the industry working around him. That’s four.

我和 Paul Buchheit 聊天时他说了一句话很精彩。我当时都没有意识到，原来他身边真的是行业里最优秀的人才。这是第四点。

Five, culture. A culture of thinking insanely big mostly by inexperienced, untainted people, that helps you with creativity, that helps you come up with new ideas. It was like the naivete of kids on a college campus who are dreaming, matched with the brain power of the very best PhDs, and this hardcore belief that whatever our big ideas are, we always have to think with scale.

第五是文化。一种敢想敢做的文化，主要由没有偏见、没有旧包袱的新人推动，这种文化激发创造力、激发新点子。就像是一群在校园里怀揣梦想的孩子们的天真想法，再加上一群最顶尖博士的头脑和执行力。他们坚信无论我们提出多大胆的想法，都必须从规模角度来思考能否落地。

Every little implementation detail has to be, as this scales, will this work? Or do we need to rearchitect the system, is very impressive. So, culture, which includes power law dynamics, by the way. Being willing to make big, bold bets because they could be these multi-billion dollar payoffs. That’s five.

每一个细节都要问自己：“当它扩展时还能运行吗？我们是否需要重新构建系统？”这种精神令人敬佩。这种文化还包括幂律思维：敢于下注，敢于赌大，因为一旦赌对，就是百亿美元的回报。这是第五点。

Six, the self-reinforcing data network effects once it takes off. I think that is underappreciated about Google. A lot of people say oh the algorithm, but the algorithm is so dependent on all the data that is generated.

第六，一旦起飞，就会形成自我强化的数据网络效应。我觉得这一点经常被低估了。很多人只说算法好，但算法实际上极度依赖于用户产生的数据。

Then lastly, a mission that has stood the test of time. Organize the world’s information. It’s not too broad, it’s not too narrow, it feels altruistic, but of course, the business behind it is actually the best business of all time.

最后一点，是经得起时间考验的使命：整理全球信息。这个使命既不太宽泛，也不过于狭窄，听起来很利他，但背后的商业逻辑，其实是历史上最强的商业模式之一。

David: I would add on to the second to last one you had there the data network effects. It also is the flywheel effect of liquidity in the marketplace of users and queries and advertisers. Everything that we just talked about. Once Google had that realization of oh, our business gets better the more users and advertisers we have, and thus we should be willing to spend basically anything to increase those two pools.

David：我想补充你倒数第二点提到的数据网络效应。其实这也是一个市场流动性的飞轮效应——用户、搜索请求和广告主之间的飞轮。我们刚刚提到的这些事都指向一点：Google 意识到他们的生意越做越好是因为用户和广告主越多，所以他们愿意不计代价地去扩大这两者的规模。

Ben: This is my quintessence.

Ben：这就是我总结的精华所在。

David: Oh, okay. I’m stealing your quintessence. I love it.

David：哦，原来我把你的精华抢先说了。我太喜欢这个观点了。

Ben: I feel like this is the most unique insight of this episode is whoa, these are economies of scale that don’t just reduce your costs as you get bigger, but it increases your revenue as you get bigger.

Ben：我觉得这是本集里最有价值的独特洞见：这是那种规模经济，不只是规模越大成本越低，而是规模越大，收入也能越多。

David: Okay, great. Well I didn’t mean to steal you thunder with quintessence. Sorry about that.

David：好吧。其实我不是故意抢你风头的，抱歉啊。

Ben: We did our quintessence early this episode.

Ben：我们这一集把“精华”提前揭晓了。

David: Okay, great. Good.

David：很好，很棒。

Ben: All right, give me your playbook.

Ben：好啦，该你说说你的经验总结了。

David: I’ve got two other meta points that jumped out to me from this episode, in addition to what you just said about the incredible encapsulation of why Google worked.

David：除了你刚刚精彩总结的“Google 为什么成功”的精髓，我这集里还特别注意到另外两个更宏观的点。

When you and I were talking about doing this and starting the Google series, the reason we decided now was the right time was because of everything going on in AI. It feels like understanding Google has never been more relevant. If we’re going to do Google on Acquired, we got to start at the beginning and understand how Google was built, because that’s what we do. I thought, oh, this episode will set the stage to then get to today. Telling the story, though, and doing the research, I was like, today is exactly the same. The parallels—

当我们讨论要不要做 Google 系列时，我们之所以决定“就是现在”，完全是因为当下 AI 的爆炸式发展。此时理解 Google，比以往任何时候都更重要。如果我们要在 Acquired 节目中讲 Google，就必须从头讲起，搞清楚 Google 是怎么建立起来的——这就是我们节目一直在做的。我原本以为这集只是为当下的局势打基础，但讲着讲着、研究着研究着，我发现：现在发生的一切，和当年几乎是一模一样。那种相似感——

Ben: I had the exact same thought.

Ben：我也完全有同感。

David: Between what happened between 1996 and 2002 feels like everything that we are living through right now.

David：1996 到 2002 年间发生的那些事，感觉跟我们现在经历的一模一样。

Ben: Yeah, 2021 to today.

Ben：对，2021 年到现在这段时间。

David: Or even, let’s start with the ChatGPT moment.

David：甚至可以说，从 ChatGPT 的横空出世开始。

Ben: Put sharper, I thought this was going to be, well we’re going to have to eat a lot of vegetables to understand Google, so that we can understand where the Transformer came from, to get to the real great meat and what we can learn about AI by studying the present.

Ben：更直接地说，我原以为这是一次“吃蔬菜”的过程——我们得先理解 Google 的历史背景，这样才能理解 Transformer 是从哪来的，才能进入 AI 的“肉类主菜”阶段，从当下的 AI 中学习点真正有价值的东西。

But I think by studying the way that search played out, how did monetization work? How did the value chains work? How did distribution work? How did monetization work that uniquely enabled distribution? Where did all the competitive dynamics come from? This is a ‘history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes,’ and God, does this rhyme.

但我现在觉得，通过研究当年搜索引擎如何展开竞争，商业化是怎么做的、价值链是怎么运转的、分发机制如何构建、又是怎样的商业化设计反过来推动了分发，以及竞争动态从哪里来——你会发现，“历史不会简单重演，但总是押韵”，而这一次，真的是太押韵了。

David: Totally transferable lessons and dynamics. When you were telling the story of GoTo and Overture and the launch at TED, and how upset people were but how brilliant, I was thinking, well what would the analogy be today? What if somebody made a chat bot, an LLM model, and what it told you was just what people paid it to tell you, people would go crazy if that happened. But is that worth trying? Should somebody try that? Well, let’s see.

David：有太多经验和商业机制是可以迁移过来的。当你讲 GoTo 和 Overture 在 TED 发布、结果被现场观众嘘声不断时，我就在想，今天的类比是什么？假如有人做出一个聊天机器人——一个大语言模型，它回答的问题完全基于谁花钱最多，那么今天人们肯定会暴跳如雷。但这个点值不值得一试？有没有人真的会去尝试？咱们拭目以待。

Ben: Product design here on Acquired by David Rosenthal.

Ben：欢迎收听 David Rosenthal 的《Acquired 产品设计工坊》。

David: Probably a bad idea. But if it feels like such a similar moment that we’re in. That’s just what struck me over the head doing all of this. Like wow. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

David：可能不是个好主意（笑）。但这真的让我感受到我们正处于一个极其相似的历史节点。这就是这次研究和讲述整个故事给我最大的震撼：历史不会简单重演，但确实押韵。

Then the other big playbook theme I had was, God, did Google really come of age at exactly the right time. We talked about this earlier, but if Larry and Sergey had met and started working on this a few years earlier, it would’ve been Yahoo. Because the web was just so much smaller. You didn’t need a technology-based search engine to understand it.

我另外一个感触很深的经验点是：天哪，Google 真的是在**最恰当的时机**成长起来的。我们之前也讲到过，如果 Larry 和 Sergey 早几年相遇、早几年开始搞这个项目，那结果很可能就是 Yahoo 了。因为那时候网络还太小了，根本不需要技术驱动的搜索引擎来“理解”网页。

Then if they’d started a few years later, it would’ve been too late. It would’ve already been too big. You would’ve needed too much technology and power to make it work. It was the perfect window.

如果他们再晚几年开始，那就为时已晚了。网络已经变得太大，你需要投入的技术和计算资源就太高。那个时机简直完美。

Ben: There was a very narrow window to start the Google of that era.

Ben：那个时代，要打造 Google 这样一家公司，其实时间窗口非常窄。

David: And again, maybe this is a subpoint of my first playbook theme of just the parallels to today.

David：这可能又是我之前提到的历史押韵主题的一个子点吧。

Ben: All right, powers. What of the seven powers does Google have? And for new listeners to the show, this is based on a book called *Seven Powers* by Hamilton Helmer. It is the seven factors that enable a business to achieve persistent differential returns, or basically how to be way more profitable than your closest competitor sustainably. The seven are counter positioning, scale economies, switching costs, network economies, process power, branding, and cornered resource.

Ben：好了，我们来谈谈“Seven Powers”——Google 拥有哪些商业护城河？为了新听众解释一下，这本书叫《Seven Powers》，作者是 Hamilton Helmer。书里提出七种能让一家公司实现长期持续超额利润的护城河，简单说就是“如何在竞争中持续碾压对手”。这七种是：反向定位（counter positioning）、规模经济（scale economies）、转换成本（switching costs）、网络效应（network economies）、流程能力（process power）、品牌（branding）和独占资源（cornered resource）。

Let’s see. To start, I guess let’s just go down the list. I actually don’t think there was tremendous counter positioning here. You could argue versus Yahoo.

那我们一项项看。首先是“反向定位”。我觉得 Google 在这方面并不特别强。你也许可以说相对于 Yahoo 有一些，但并不是很明显。

David: Well it’s interesting because it was a new industry. They were counter positioned against the other search engines that existed at the time, in that they, as we talked about with Excite when they were trying to sell BackRub to Excite, the other search engines wanted you to stay on the page and Google didn’t. But I don’t think that really counts because it was a new industry and those were big players. There was no incumbent already there.

David：这点很有意思，因为这是个新兴行业。从某种程度上来说，他们确实是在做“反向定位”，比如我们说过的那次，他们试图把 BackRub 卖给 Excite，当时的其他搜索引擎都希望你停留在页面上，而 Google 则不希望。但我觉得这不能算真正的“反向定位”，因为这是一个全新的行业，还没有真正的“既有主导者”。

Ben: Google was just better. Being better is not counter positioning. The best argument for counter positioning is versus the portals.

Ben：Google 只是做得更好。单纯更好不算是“反向定位”。真要说有反向定位的地方，那得是对门户网站而言。

David: Versus Yahoo.

David：对，比如 Yahoo。

Ben: It may have become clear at some point that search actually is important, but the portals couldn’t really pivot to it because they couldn’t give up all of their portal ad revenues.

Ben：后来人们也许意识到搜索其实很重要，但门户网站没法真的转向，因为他们舍不得门户广告的营收。

David: I think that’s also right. Also take Yahoo. Yahoo had constructed itself as a media company even though it was started by two electrical engineering PhDs from Stanford and just couldn’t pivot. Famously tried to write about Overture, then it bought Inktomi, and then they spent years trying to put Overture and Inktomi together to create a packaged competitor to Google.

David：我同意。而且看看 Yahoo 本身。虽然它是两个斯坦福的电子工程博士创办的，但后来整个公司架构是按媒体公司来建的，所以他们根本没法转型。他们曾尝试引入 Overture，然后收购了 Inktomi，之后花了好几年试图把这两个整合起来，打造一个能对抗 Google 的整合搜索方案。

This was the ill-fated project Panama at Yahoo, which, by the way, acquired easter egg. That is where Jan Koum and Brian Acton met at Yahoo, then they would get so frustrated and leave and start WhatsApp. But yeah, I think there’s counter positioning against Yahoo there.

这就是 Yahoo 那个命运多舛的 Project Panama。顺带一提，这也是个有趣的彩蛋——Jan Koum 和 Brian Acton 就是在 Yahoo 相识的，然后因为太失望才离开，去创办了 WhatsApp。所以我觉得，从 Yahoo 的角度看，Google 确实构成了“反向定位”。

Ben: Okay. Scale economies?

Ben：好，那说说“规模经济”？

David: For sure.

David：那是肯定的。

Ben: There are more powers here too, but the whole thing is scale economies. And it’s more than just the traditional one. If you think about Hamilton’s traditional definition here, is that Netflix has scale economies because it can amortize the cost of buying a given piece of content across more users. This is more than that. This is for a given piece of infrastructure or software or hardware investment that Google wants to make…

Ben：这方面不止一个优势，但整体来说就是规模经济。其实它还超出了传统意义上的规模经济。按照 Hamilton 的定义，比如 Netflix 的规模经济，是说它可以把一部剧的购买成本摊到更多用户头上。而 Google 的情况远比这复杂。比如它的某个基础设施、软件、硬件投入——

David: Or a user acquisition cost?

David：甚至是获客成本？

Ben: Right. They can amortize that across more users. But also as they scale, they make more revenue per user. I don’t know what that is. Is that a new power?

Ben：对，这些成本都可以在更大的用户基数上摊销。但更重要的是，随着用户增长，他们每个用户的收益反而在增加。我不知道这算什么，是不是一种新的“power”？

David: Super scale economies? Yeah.

David：“超级规模经济”？也许吧。

Ben: Where does this come from? Auction-based businesses. Whenever you have auctions to determine pricing, the more liquidity you have, the higher price is. Are there other businesses that we can look at that are similar? Do scale economies ever explain why scale gets you more revenue? What is the thing where with an increase in scale, their prices go up? They maximize their available take on any given micro auction.

Ben：这是从哪里来的？我觉得是拍卖驱动型的商业模式。只要你用拍卖来定价，流动性越大，价格就越高。有没有别的行业也这样？有没有规模经济能解释“规模越大、营收越高”的？什么情况下，公司规模越大，价格反而能越高？他们能从每场微型拍卖中榨取的价值也就越大。

股票的价格也是这个逻辑，绝佳的商业模式。

This is weird. I’m trying to think in another auction-based world. Christie’s would have this. Or Sotheby’s. As you get more and more people into the auction house audience, any given sale is likely to go at a higher value. A real estate brokerage, if people were actually loyal clients of a real estate brokerage.

这还挺特别的。我试图类比其他拍卖场景。比如佳士得或者苏富比就是这样，人越多，每次拍品的成交价就越高。或者一家房地产中介，如果客户真的很忠诚，也是这个逻辑。

David: Oh, is this just network economies? That the more queries you have, the more advertisers you’ll have? The more advertisers you’ll have, the more…?

David：噢，这会不会其实就是网络效应？你的搜索请求越多，就能吸引越多广告主；广告主越多，又反过来吸引更多搜索请求……

Ben: But typically network economies are when people join the network, it creates value for other people in the network. That is true from an advertiser to a searcher and a searcher to an advertiser. We should say this definitely has network economies. It’s almost like there’s negative network economies from advertiser to advertiser. You don’t want your competitors to be on the platform, but Google does.

Ben：但传统定义上的网络效应，是说新用户加入网络，会给其他用户带来价值。在 Google 这确实也成立，比如广告主对搜索用户有价值，反之亦然。所以我们可以说 Google 是有网络效应的。但广告主对广告主之间，反而有点“负网络效应”——你不希望你的竞争对手也在平台上，但 Google 却希望。

David: Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s something unique to auction models here because the price is dynamic.

David：你可能说得对。也许这确实是拍卖模型的一种独特性，因为它的价格是动态浮动的。

Ben: Hamilton, if you’re listening, we need to talk.

Ben：Hamilton，如果你在听，我们得聊聊了。

David: Yeah. Great. Okay, let’s keep going.

David：好啊。继续说下去吧。

Ben: Switching costs?

Ben：说说“转换成本”？

David: Not yet. Talk about that in the next episode.

David：现在还没有。我们留到下一集讲。

Ben: When you’re not logged in and there’s no personalization, no real switching costs yet. And everything else you’d switch to is worse honestly.

Ben：在你还没登录、没有个性化服务的阶段，基本没有什么转换成本。而且说实话，你换到其他平台，体验还更差。

David: Branding. Yeah, to a certain extent.

David：品牌力？有一定程度。

Ben: Absolutely. They built a brand of trust, speed, and fun. I had a Google shirt. I used to read Google blogs. I’m trying to think, let me date the year. 2002–2006, I was as big a Google fan of things that were googly as I was an Apple fan for that period of my time. I think a lot of people were. I think for those of us who weren’t in Silicon Valley, that’s what it meant to be successful at Silicon Valley was to become Google.

Ben：当然有。他们打造的是一个关于“信任、速度、乐趣”的品牌。我以前还有一件 Google 的 T 恤，也常看他们的博客。大概是在 2002 到 2006 年这段时间，我对 Google 的狂热程度和我当时对 Apple 的差不多。我相信很多人也一样。对我们这些不在硅谷的人来说，所谓“硅谷成功”的象征就是变成 Google 那样的公司。

David: I would agree with that, too. I think it’s weak branding power, though, because that’s not a branding power like Hermes has branding power. It’s gone away over time now. It’s just…

David：我也同意。不过我觉得这种品牌力相对“弱”一些。它不像爱马仕那样拥有那种能长期维持的品牌势能。随着时间过去，Google 的那种品牌光环也慢慢消退了，现在已经……

Ben: And for the literal definition, are people willing to pay more for the brand? Are advertisers willing to spend more on Google than elsewhere? No, they’re rational actors.

Ben：从严格意义上的定义来说，人们是否愿意为这个品牌付出更高的价格？广告主是否愿意在 Google 上比其他平台花更多钱？显然不是，他们是理性决策者。

David: They had an employment brand, though, to your point.

David：不过他们确实有雇主品牌，你说得对。

Ben: They absolutely had an employment brand.

Ben：毫无疑问。他们的雇主品牌非常强。

David: Smart people would be willing to do anything to work at Google.

David：聪明人愿意做任何事来加入 Google。

Ben: Yup. Lastly, cornered resource. Not really at this point in time.

Ben：是的。最后是“独占资源”？那个时候还没有。

David: Not really.

David：确实没有。

Ben: And process power, I also don’t think there’s much there.

Ben：“流程优势”我也不觉得有什么可说的。

David: Yeah, I don’t think so.

David：我也不这么认为。

Okay, quintessence. We already talked about yours. Do you want to say another word on it?

好了，说说精髓吧。你的那部分我们已经谈过了，还想补充什么吗？

Ben: No. The increasing returns to scale, the revenue side is unbelievable. The fact that they can have that insight and then realize they need to go be super aggressive on spending, it makes total sense. If you have a long view and think, are ARPUs are only going to grow up? People are going to be sticky forever? It is worth investing heavily to win this race. It’s amazing.

Ben：不用了。我说的就是“规模扩大带来收益递增”，这点太不可思议了。他们有这种洞察，然后立刻意识到必须在支出上大举投入，这非常合理。如果你有长期眼光，知道每用户平均收入只会持续增长、用户粘性会长期存在，那你当然要全力投入去赢这场战争。这太惊人了。

David: I love your quintessence. It’s totally right. I will second and underline it.

David：我非常喜欢你说的这点。这完全正确。我表示完全认同，还要重点标出来。

One not quite as good, but alternative quintessence I want to put out there about Google is a quote from a page in Steven Levy’s book, *In the Plex*.

还有一个备选的精髓点，虽然不如你那个深刻，但也值得一提，是出自 Steven Levy 写的《In the Plex》一书里的一段话。

“On June 8th, 2007, Justin Rosenstein, who until recently had been a Google product manager, sent an email to his colleagues. ‘I am writing to spread good news,’ the missive said. ‘Facebook really is that company. Which company? That one. The company that shows up once in a very long while. The Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company that’s on the cusp of changing the world, that’s still small enough, where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you it was rolling toward the promised land.’ That was Google. Google was ‘that’ company. Microsoft was the first ‘that’ company. Google was ‘that’ company, and then Facebook was ‘that’ company.”

“2007年6月8日，Justin Rosenstein——直到不久前还是 Google 的产品经理——发了一封邮件给他的同事。邮件内容是：‘我写信是想分享一个好消息。Facebook 真的是那家公司。哪家公司？就是那种罕见的公司。昨天的 Google，久远年代的微软。那种正在改变世界、又还够小、每个员工都能产生巨大影响的公司。如果现在不跳上这班车，三年后你肯定会后悔。即便已经有人告诉你它正驶向应许之地。’ Google 就是那种公司。微软是第一个，Google 是第二个，之后是 Facebook。”

Ben: That’s exactly right.

Ben：完全正确。

David: And they’re exceedingly, exceedingly rare.

David：而这种公司极其、极其罕见。

Ben: Yes they are.

Ben：没错，确实如此。

Ben: That about captures it.

Ben：差不多就说完了。

David: That’s my quintessence. Google was that company.

David：这就是我认为的精髓——Google 曾是“那家公司”。

Ben: All right, carve outs?

Ben：好，那说说我们最近的推荐？

David: Carve outs.

David：推荐时间到了。

Ben: I have a three-way tie of three excellent TV shows that I watched in the last (I guess) two months because we didn’t do carve outs with Steve Balmer.

Ben：我最近有三个并列推荐的超棒剧集，都是过去两个月看的。因为我们和 Steve Ballmer 那集没聊推荐。

David: Great.

David：太好了。

Ben: The first and (I think) the most landmark of mine is *The Rehearsal* with Nathan Fielder, season two. Oh my God. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone. If you’re a person who believes that anything is spoilers, stop. I’ll tell you things that you’ll learn in the first 10 minutes of the first episode.

Ben：第一个，也是我觉得最“划时代”的，是 Nathan Fielder 的《The Rehearsal》第二季。天啊，太精彩了。我不想剧透，如果你是那种觉得任何细节都是剧透的人，现在可以先停下。我接下来说的，只是第一集前10分钟你就会知道的内容。

Nathan, just to give you some quick background, a decade ago did a show called *Nathan for You* where he went and helped small business owners figure out how to make their businesses better, improve on a key area. But it’s all satirical. The way that he helps them accomplish their goals is very bad for their business in most other respects. He’s an incredible comedian, really dry sense of humor.

简单介绍一下 Nathan：大概十年前他做过一档节目叫《Nathan for You》，节目里他去帮一些小企业主提升业务、改善经营——不过整档节目是讽刺风格的。他帮的方法，往往对这些企业来说其实是毁灭性的。他是一位极具才华的喜剧演员，幽默风格非常冷峻。

The thing that he did in *Nathan for You* was a pretty good commitment to the bit. The lengths that he would go to. For example, to get a coffee shop owner to get more traffic in their store, they rebranded the store to Dumb Starbucks. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of the studio’s money, or maybe millions of dollars to commit to this rebrand. Obviously a bad idea. but great TV.

在《Nathan for You》中，他已经展现出“死磕笑点”的疯狂执着。比如，为了帮一个咖啡店吸引人流，他把整家店重塑为“傻子星巴克”（Dumb Starbucks）。为了这个噱头，他砸了几十万甚至上百万美元的制作费。这个主意当然很糟糕，但节目效果极佳。

In *The Rehearsal*, he commits to the bit so unbelievably hard, it takes years of his life. He has a goal to reduce the number of plane crashes by doing a deep study of the thing that causes plane crashes, which he believes to be pilot communication.

在《The Rehearsal》里，他对“笑点”的投入更是到了令人难以置信的程度，甚至为此付出多年的生命。他的目标是减少飞机失事。他的方法是深入研究导致事故的根源——他认为是飞行员之间的沟通问题。

In this season of *The Rehearsal*, he builds elaborate sets and hires a bunch of actors to simulate different experiences, to help these pilots feel more comfortable communicating with each other, so that fewer planes will crash. I am telling you, David, this is the tip of the iceberg. It gets crazy.

在本季节目中，他搭建了复杂的布景，雇佣了一堆演员模拟各种情境，来帮助飞行员变得更擅长沟通，以此减少空难。我跟你说，David，这只是冰山一角，后面会越来越疯。

David: Sounds amazing.

David：听起来太精彩了。

Ben: Commitment to the bit at an all time. Great.

Ben：“为了笑点豁出去”到了前所未有的高度。太棒了。

David: Are we committed to the bit?

David：我们对笑点也有这么执着吗？

Ben: We are nowhere near as committed to the bit as Nathan does.

Ben：我们跟 Nathan 比，根本不在一个级别上。

David: It doesn’t sound like we’re not, yeah.

David：听起来确实远远不够执着，哈哈。

Ben: It’s inspiring. Okay, so that’s one. Two is a much more casual, very enjoyable show called *Your Friends & Neighbors* on Apple TV. It’s John Ham. It’s beautifully shot. It’s a little bit like following rich people around *Succession* is, these fictional characters, but with an unexpected twist. Love *Your Friends & Neighbors* on Apple TV.

Ben：太有启发了。好，这是第一个推荐。第二个是风格更轻松、非常好看的剧，《Your Friends & Neighbors》，在 Apple TV 上播。主演是 John Ham，画面拍得很漂亮。这个剧有点像《Succession》，看的是一群有钱人的生活，都是虚构角色，但剧情里有个出人意料的转折。我很喜欢，强烈推荐。

And then *Andor* season two on Disney was excellent. Starts a little slow at first. Three, four episodes are not as good as season one in my opinion, but the last eight episodes are some of the best *Star Wars* canon that exists.

第三个是迪士尼的《Andor》第二季。前面几集节奏慢，前三四集不如第一季好看，但后面八集可以说是《星球大战》正史中最精彩的部分之一。

David: I love it. Ben, in addition to being my best friend, you are also my smart friend who has great TV recommendations. I love that you get to be that smart TV recommender friend for the Internet, too.

David：太棒了，Ben。你不仅是我最好的朋友，还是那个特别聪明、懂得推荐好剧的朋友。现在你还成了互联网的“剧王推荐人”，我很喜欢。

Ben: I’m here for you and I will continue dumping this on you, even though I know you don’t watch TV. you’ll never get to any of these.

Ben：我就是干这个的，即使我知道你根本不看剧，这些你八成一个都不会去看，我还是会继续安利你。

David: I would like to.

David：我真是想看啊。

Ben: This is for listeners. This isn’t for you.

Ben：这些是说给听众的，不是说给你。

David: Two little kids. Tough, tough. My carve outs, I’ve got two. Well, I’ve got one standard carveout: *GameCraft* season three. *GameCraft* podcast. We did a crossover with Mitch and Blake years ago. They have really committed to the bit. Season three is excellent. I’m so glad they’ve kept up the podcast. It’s really great. If you like gaming the gaming industry, Mitch and Blaker, two of the best in the business.

David：两个小孩要带啊，确实太难了。我这次有两个推荐。第一个是常规推荐：播客《GameCraft》第三季。几年前我们和主持人 Mitch、Blake 做过一次联合节目。他们现在依然坚持在做，第三季非常出色。特别棒。我很高兴他们一直坚持做下去。如果你喜欢游戏行业，《GameCraft》非常值得听。Mitch 和 Blake 是业界顶尖的两位人物。

My next carve out related to that is actually a real-time dilemma carve out. This is good because it could be a multi-part series here on Google. I’ll report back in the next episode which direction I went with this carve out. As I said before, I think I did a preemptive carve out.

我的第二个推荐，或者说是一个“现场纠结”的推荐。这很适合我们做 Google 系列的节目，因为这个话题可以在后面继续聊。我会在下集节目录音时告诉大家，我最后选了哪一个。就像之前说的，我这算是“预先推荐”。

I was so excited for Switch 2. Switch 2 finally launched. I haven’t gotten one yet. I have a reservation for a shopping appointment at the Nintendo store in San Francisco, the new Nintendo store here in San Francisco. Super excited. I can’t wait for it. I can’t wait to play it with my daughters someday as they’re approaching that age.

我本来特别期待 Switch 2，它终于发布了。虽然我现在还没买，但我已经预约了在旧金山任天堂门店的购买名额。真的特别激动。我已经迫不及待想和我女儿一起玩了，她们也快到那个年纪了。

Ben: All right, what’s the decision?

Ben：所以你的纠结是什么？

David: As I was watching reviews on YouTube, I started getting into Steam Deck content. Now, I’m desperately conflicted. Do I want to get the Switch 2 like I’d been planning, or do I want to go in a totally different direction and get a Steam Deck?

David：我在 YouTube 上看 Switch 2 的测评时，结果开始被 Steam Deck 的视频吸引住了。现在我很纠结：我是坚持原计划买 Switch 2，还是干脆换个方向买 Steam Deck？

Ben: Well, *Acquired* listeners, tune in. If you weren’t interested in Google Part II on its own merits, now you’re going to be on pins and needles from this carve out.

Ben：好吧，亲爱的《Acquired》的听众们，记得继续收听。如果你本来对 Google 第二部分没那么感兴趣，现在也得关注下了，因为得看看 David 到底选了哪个！

David: I would ask our listener base for help with this decision, and I would love all of your thoughts, but because of our editing process the reality is I will have made my decision already by the time this episode goes live.

David：本来我想让听众帮我做决定，我也真的很想听听大家的意见，但现实是……因为我们节目有剪辑流程，这期上线时，我早就已经做完决定了。

Ben: Tweet a picture to listeners who need to know.

Ben：那你发张照片给听众看看，让他们知道你选了哪个。

David: I’ll tweet a picture, yes. That’s what I got.

David：我会发照片的。就这些了。

Ben: Awesome. Well listeners, we would love to see you in New York City. acquired.fm/nyc if you want to come and be a part of the ridiculous *Acquired* experience we are planning at Radio City Music Hall with our good friends at J.P. Morgan Payments.

Ben：太棒了。听众朋友们，我们非常希望在纽约和你们见面。如果你想亲身参与我们在无线电城音乐厅（Radio City Music Hall）和 J.P. Morgan Payments 合作举办的这场盛会，欢迎访问 acquired.fm/nyc 报名。

Speaking of J.P. Morgan Payments, thank you to our partners this season. J.P. Morgan Payments offers trusted, reliable payments infrastructure for your business no matter the scale. To Anthropic, the makers of Claude, an excellent AI assistant that I used a ton in prepping for this episode.

说到 J.P. Morgan Payments，感谢他们作为本季节目的合作伙伴。他们为各类企业提供值得信赖的支付基础设施。不论企业规模大小，都能满足需求。还要感谢 Anthropic，他们的 AI 助手 Claude 非常优秀，我在准备这一期节目时大量使用了它。

David: Me too.

David：我也是。

Ben: It is transforming the way Acquired works, which is just awesome. To Statsig, the best way to do experimentation and more as a product development team. And Vercel, your complete platform for web development.

Ben：Claude 正在彻底改变《Acquired》的运作方式，实在太棒了。感谢 Statsig，他们是产品开发团队进行实验与优化的最佳工具。还有 Vercel，全面支持网页开发的一站式平台。

We’ve got some thank yous. We talked to a zillion people as seems to be the new precedent when we do these large tech companies. One off the top, Arvind Navaratnam for Worldly Partners. Did an awesome writeup on the company, as usual, which he will make available by clicking the link in the show notes. Then David, you’ve been maintaining the list.

我们要表达一些感谢。每次我们做这类大型科技公司的专题，总是会采访无数人，已经成了惯例。首先要感谢 Worldly Partners 的 Arvind Navaratnam，他一如既往写了非常精彩的公司分析，你可以通过节目备注里的链接查看。David，这份感谢名单你一直在整理吧？

David: Yes, I’ve been maintaining the list of some of the folks we should thank for helping us with this episode, in addition to the many other folks we talked to who we can’t mention, but thank you, you know who you are.

David：对，我一直在整理。除了那些因为各种原因不能点名但我们深深感谢的人之外，这里是我们特别想公开致谢的一些人，你们知道自己是谁，谢谢你们。

But specifically thank you to Craig Silverstein, Google’s first employee, to Anna Patterson, to Omid Kordestani, Alan Eustace, Clay Bavor, Bret Taylor, Jeff Dean, Jen Fitzpatrick, Danny Sullivan, Nick Fox.

特别感谢 Google 的第一位员工 Craig Silverstein，以及 Anna Patterson、Omid Kordestani、Alan Eustace、Clay Bavor、Bret Taylor、Jeff Dean、Jen Fitzpatrick、Danny Sullivan 和 Nick Fox。

Ben: And to Paul Buchheit, to Bill Gross, to Wesley Chan, and to Izar Levkovitz. Thank you so much for the conversations. David, I feel like we got a dream team of people if we want to go start a tech company.

Ben：还要感谢 Paul Buchheit、Bill Gross、Wesley Chan 和 Izar Levkovitz。非常感谢你们抽时间和我们交流。David，我感觉如果我们真要创办一家科技公司，这几位就是梦幻创业阵容了。

David: That’s an all star lineup. I started joking by the end of the research process. I was like, I think we are sapping billions of dollars of market cap out of the economy by taking people’s time to have these conversations, so we greatly appreciate it.

David：这确实是超级全明星阵容。我研究到最后都开玩笑说，我们可能正在无形中把市场上的数十亿美元市值从这些公司里“吸”出来——因为我们占用了这些人的时间来和我们聊。所以，我们真的非常感激。

Ben: Yup. All right listeners, we’ll see you next time.

Ben：没错。好了，听众朋友们，我们下次见。

David: We’ll see you next time.

David：下期再见。

---

**Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.**

**注意：Acquired 的主持人与嘉宾可能持有本期节目中提到的资产。本播客不构成投资建议，仅用于信息分享与娱乐。进行任何财务交易前，请自行研究并做出独立判断。**

2025-06-29 Acquired.Google

2025-06-29 Acquired.Google

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