Ten things we know to be true（Google 的十大价值观）
"The perfect search engine," says co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." When Google began, you would have been pleasantly surprised to enter a search query and immediately find the right answer. Google became successful precisely because we were better and faster at finding the right answer than other search engines at the time.
（Google 联合创始人拉里·佩奇说，“完美的搜索引擎需要做到确解用户之意，切返用户之需”。Google 推出搜索服务之初，您可能惊喜地发现输入搜索查询后就能迅速得到正确答案。Google 之所以取得成功，正是因为我们当时能比其他搜索引擎更快更好地找到合适的结果。）
But technology has come a long way since then, and the face of the web has changed. Recognizing that search is a problem that will never be solved, we continue to push the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service that anyone seeking information can access, whether they’re at a desk in Boston or on a phone in Bangkok. We’ve also taken the lessons we’ve learned from search to tackle even more challenges.
（但在那之后，技术一路发展，网络的面貌已经发生了翻天覆地的变化。我们意识到搜索是一个不可能完全解决的问题，因此，我们不断挑战现有技术的极限，努力提供快速、准确且易于使用的服务。无论搜索用户是在波士顿使用计算机，还是在曼谷街头拿着手机漫步，他们都能获得这样的服务。我们始终从搜索的过程中吸取经验，从而应对更多的挑战。）
As we keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide our actions.
（在继续向未来迈进之际，我们会遵循以下核心原则，规范自己的行动。）
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.（以用户为中心，其他一切水到渠成。）
Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.
(创建伊始，Google 就以提供最佳的用户体验为中心任务。不管是设计新的互联网浏览器，还是采用新的首页外观，我们都非常谨慎，确保它们最终可以满足“用户”的需求，而不是达到我们自己的内部目标或底线。我们的首页界面简单明了，网页载入十分迅速。我们从不对外出售搜索结果中的展示位置。对于广告，我们不仅清楚地将它们标记出来，而且广告内容也与搜索结果相关，从而确保不会分散用户的注意力。在构建新的工具和应用程序时，我们秉持这样一种理念，设计出来的产品应该非常出色，用户无需再去考虑如果采用其他设计会是怎样。)
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.（心无旁骛、精益求精。）
We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
(Google 要做的就是搜索。我们拥有世界上最大的研究队伍之一，可以心无旁骛地攻克搜索问题，我们知道自己擅长什么，也知道如何可以做得更好。我们会对难题持之以恒地反复研究，因此，我们能够解决复杂的问题，即使我们的搜索服务已经在为数百万用户提供快捷、流畅的信息搜索体验，我们仍能不断对其进行改进。我们在不断地改善搜索服务，这也有助于我们将掌握到的知识技术应用于 Gmail 和 Google 地图等新产品。我们希望将强大的搜索功能应用于未曾探索过的领域，并帮助用户更多地获取和使用生活中不断增加的信息。)
3. Fast is better than slow.（快比慢好。）
We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away – and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.
(我们知道您的时间非常宝贵，因此，在遇到问题时，您一定希望能通过网络迅速地找到解决方案，而这正是我们的目标。我们希望用户在首页上花费的时间越短越好，这样的理念可能在世界上也是独一无二的。我们不断精简网页并提高服务环境的效率，一次次地打破自己创造的速度纪录，现在的平均搜索结果响应时间仅为几分之一秒。我们推出的每种新产品都非常注重速度，无论是移动应用程序还是谷歌浏览器（一种旨在跟上现代网络速度的高速浏览器）都是如此。而且，我们始终致力于提高所有产品的运行速度。)
4. Democracy on the web works.（网络的民主作风。）
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been "voted" to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.
(Google 搜索之所以成功，是因为它有数百万在网站上发布链接的用户；他们帮助我们确定出哪些网站提供了有价值的内容。在评估每个网页的重要性时，我们采用了 200 多个指标以及各种技术，其中包含我们的专利算法 PageRank™，它可以分析出哪些网站被网络中的其他网页“票选”为最佳信息来源。随着网络规模的扩大，这一评估方法也会越来越完善，因为每个新网站在提供信息的同时，也是另一张待统计的选票。我们还使用同样的思路，积极地进行开源软件的开发，并在许多编程人员的共同努力下，不断推出各种创新产品。)
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.（获取信息的方式多种多样，不必非要坐在台式机前。）
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.
(今天的世界已变得越来越“移动化”，因为人们希望随时随地都能获得所需的信息。我们不断开创新的移动服务技术，推出新的移动服务解决方案，帮助全球用户在自己的手机上执行各种各样的任务，比如查看电子邮件和日历活动以及观看视频，更别说在手机上通过多种不同的方式使用 Google 搜索功能。此外，我们希望通过 Android 激起全球各地移动用户更强的创新意识。Android 是一个免费的开放源代码移动平台，它将开放性这一塑造互联网不可缺少的因素带入了移动世界。Android 不仅能为客户带来利益，让他们拥有更多选择余地和更富创意的移动体验，也为运营商、制造商和开发人员创造了营收机会。)
6. You can make money without doing evil.（不做坏事也能赚钱。）
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
- We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
- We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
- Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
(作为一家公司，Google 的收入来源分以下两种：一是向其他公司提供搜索技术，另一个则是向广告客户提供在 Google 和其他网站上投放广告的服务。在世界各地，成千上万的广告客户使用 Google AdWords 推广他们的产品；无数出版商通过 Google AdSense 投放与自己网站内容相关的广告。为了确保最终能够服务所有用户（无论他们是否属于广告客户），我们制定了一系列有关我们广告服务和做法的指导原则：
- 除非广告内容与搜索结果页的内容是相关的，否则，我们不允许在搜索结果页上显示广告。我们坚信，只有广告与您要查找的内容相关时，它提供的信息才能为您所用。因此，您可能会发现，某些搜索结果中完全不包含任何广告。
- 我们相信，无需采用花哨的广告也能取得应有的效果。所以，我们拒绝弹出式广告，因为这会妨碍用户阅读所请求的内容。我们还发现，如果文字广告表现出极高的受众相关性，那么，点击率会远远高于随机显示的广告。任何广告客户（无论规模大小）都可以从这种针对性极强的广告媒介中受益。
- 在 Google 上刊登的广告总是明确地标记为“赞助商链接”，因此，这些广告不会破坏搜索结果的完整性。我们绝对不会通过操纵排名将我们的合作伙伴放在搜索结果中排名靠前的位置，也没有任何人可以购买到更高的 PageRank。我们的用户信任 Google 的客观公正性，Google 也不会因为任何短期利益而去破坏这种信任。
7. There’s always more information out there.（信息永无止境。）
Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.
(一旦 Google 索引中的互联网 HTML 网页数量超过任何其他搜索服务，我们的工程师就会将精力转到那些以前不太容易获得的信息上。为此，我们有时只需将新的数据库集成到搜索中即可（例如添加电话号码和地址查询以及企业目录），但有时还需要进行更多富于创造性的努力（例如增加更多的搜索功能，包括资讯存档搜索、专利搜索、学术期刊搜索以及对数十亿图片和数百万图书的搜索）。我们的研究人员会继续研究如何将世界上所有的信息提供给有需要的人们。)
8. The need for information crosses all borders.（信息需求，没有国界。）
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in dozens of countries, maintain more than 150 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 110 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.
(虽然 Google 是在加利福尼亚州创立的，但我们的宗旨是帮助全世界使用各种语言的用户获得信息。为了实现这一目标，我们在几十个国家/地区设立了办事处，维护了 150 多个互联网域，而且在我们所提供的搜索结果中，有一半以上是提供给美国境外用户的。我们提供 110 多种语言的 Google 搜索界面，能让用户搜索以他们自己的语言撰写的内容；对于 Google 的其他应用程序和产品，我们也计划推出尽可能多的语言版本。有了我们的翻译工具，哪怕是在地球的另一端用您完全不懂的语言所撰写的内容，您也可以找到。在这些工具和志愿译者的帮助下，我们大大增加了向用户提供的服务种类，提高了质量，同时涵盖了世界上最偏远地区的用户。)
9. You can be serious without a suit.（没有西装革履也可以很正经。）
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture – and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees – energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed – and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.
(我们的创始人秉承着“工作赋予挑战，挑战带来快乐”的理念创建了 Google。我们相信，正确的企业文化更容易创造出绝妙的、富有创意的产品，而这并不仅仅意味着设置一些熔岩灯和橡胶球。我们重视团队成绩，并以促成公司全面成功的个人成就为荣。我们非常赏识那些精力充沛、充满热情的员工，他们具有不同的背景，用极富创意的方式工作、玩乐和生活。我们的工作氛围非常轻松，但正是在排队等咖啡时、小组会议上或健身房中，新的想法不断涌现，并以令人目眩的速度在彼此之间交流、经过测试，然后投入实际应用，这些新想法往往会催生出在全世界得以广泛使用的新项目。)
10. Great just isn’t good enough.（没有最好，只有更好。）
We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious – but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.
(我们始终将自己在某方面的优势视为继续发展的起点，而不是终点。我们为自己设定目前还不能达到的目标，因为我们知道，通过不断地向这些目标努力，我们可以做得比预期更好。Google 的目标就是通过创新和反复探索得到合理的结果，再以非比寻常的方式地改进这些结果。例如，我们的一位工程师发现，用拼写正确的字词进行搜索时会得到很好的效果，于是他就开始思考搜索应当如何处理错别字。正是这种思考促使他创建了一种直观且更加实用的拼写检查工具。
即使您不太清楚自己要查找的确切内容，在网络上寻找答案也不是您的问题，而是要由我们来解决的问题。我们会尽力预测全球用户尚不明确了解的需求，并开发各种可能会成为日后新标准的产品和服务满足这些需求。以我们发布 Gmail 时的情况为例，与当时的其他电子邮件服务相比，Gmail 拥有的容量存储空间最大。但现在看来，提供如此大的存储空间似乎是理所应当的，这是因为我们现在对电子邮件的存储有了新的标准。这些都是我们所追求的改变，并且我们一直在探索能够标新立异的新领域。归根结底，我们所做的一切正是来源于永不满足于现状的态度。)
来源Google官网
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