Google is a world-famous company, with its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google(谷歌）是一家享誉世界的公司，其总部位于加州山景区。

It was set up in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998, and inflated (膨胀) with the Internet bubble.
1998年始建于硅谷的一间车房里，随着互联网泡沫的膨胀发展。

 Even when everything around it collapsed the company kept on inflating.
即使当与互联网相关的一切开始破裂的时候，它仍然飞速发展。

Google’s search engine is so widespread across the world that search became Google, and google became a verb.
Google的搜索引擎在全球范围内流传，以至于Google成了搜索的代名词，而google也成为一个动词。

The world fell in love with the effective, fascinatingly fast technology.
世界爱上了这项迷人而快捷的技术。

Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of S. Brin and L. Page, but also to a series of fortunate events.
Google的成功很大程度上归功于S.Brin和L.Page的才华，但同时也是一连串幸运事件的结果。

It was Page who, at Stanford in 1996, initiated the academic project that eventually became Google’s search engine.
1996年，Page在斯坦福大学作一个学术项目，最终成为google的搜索引擎。

Brin, who had met Page at a student orientation a year earlier, joined the project early on.
Brin在之前的一年的新生介绍会上认识了Page，随后加入了Google搜索引擎的项目。

They were both Ph.D. candidates when they devised the search engine which was better than the rest and, without any marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your grandmother.
当时他们都是博士研究生，但他们设计的搜索引擎要优于其他的，而且没有做任何市场推广，仅靠交口相传，就从最初的使用者最终传到了你祖母的耳中。

Their breakthrough, simply put, was that when their search engine crawled the Web, it did more than just look for word matches, it also tallied (统计) and ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one another.
简单来说，他们的突破发生在搜索引擎在网络上慢慢传播的时候，引擎提供的不仅仅是找寻匹配的词语，还可以根据一些关键指标如网页如何相连对主页进行统计和排序。

That delivered far better results than anything else.
引擎得到的结果比其他的都好。

Brin and Page meant to name their creation Googol (the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as Google.
Brin和Page用googol(数学术语，指前面有100个零的数字）命名他们的作品，但是有人把这个单词错拼成了Google。

They raised money from prescient (有先见之明的) professors and venture capitalists, and moved off campus to turn Google into business.
他们从有先见之明的教授和风险投资者那里筹集资金，让google从校园走向商业化。

Perhaps their biggest stroke of luck came early on when they tried to sell their technology to other search engines, but no one met their price, and they built it up on their own.
或许他们最大的运气是在早期，那是他们尝试出售自己的技术给其他引擎公司，但没有人能够满足他们的价位，于是他们决定自己创业。

The next breakthrough came in 2000, when Google figured out how to make money with its invention.
第二次突破是在2000年，当时google提出如何利用发明盈利。

 It had lots of users, but almost no one was paying.
Google有众多用户，但几乎没有人付费。

The solution turned out to be advertising, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that Google is now essentially an advertising company, given that that’s the source of nearly all its revenue.
最终的解决方法是做广告，毫不夸张的说，Gooogle现在实际上就是一家广告公司，因为几乎其所有的收入都是源于广告。

Today it is a giant advertising company, worth $100 billion
现在Google是一家巨型广告公司，其市值达到一千亿美元。