2020年高考英语外刊时事命题阅读理解：谷歌联合创始人双双宣布“退出江湖”

how two 'obnoxious' students changed the internet

谷歌联合创始人双双宣布“退出江湖”

ON THE SUMMER OF 1995, a second-year graduate student named Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective (潜在的) students. Larry Page, an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan, was one of those being shown around the campus.

“I thought he was pretty obnoxious (令人讨厌的),” Page said of the encounter. “He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too.”

“We both found each other obnoxious,” said Brin. “But we said it a little bit jokingly. Obviously, we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there.”

The technology of the web at the time meant that people could tell where a webpage linked to just by reading its code (代码). However, to get a complete list of every page to which it linked, they needed to check every other website on the internet.

Page’s “BackRub” project aimed to qualify these backlinks (反向链接). It was a complex task that not only demanded vast computing resources, but also required extremely complex mathematics, which was where the math prodigy (奇才) Brin came in.

In 1996, Page and Brin came up with the PageRank algorithm (算法) — a ranking system which would prove to be a breakthrough idea. The algorithm was devised to give more weight

to links that came from more authoritative (权威性的) pages. The more backlinks a site had, the more likely it was to be a good source. And the more the web grew, the better BackRub got.

In August 1996, BackRub became Google, a play on the term “googol,” meaning “10100.” The first version appeared on the Stanford homepage, run from computers cobbled together (七拼八凑) by Page and Brin. The system successfully enabled users to search all 24 million pages stored in its database.

On September 15, 1997, was registered. In August 1998, it got its first funding in the form of a check for $100,000 written by Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to “Google Inc.” The trouble was that Google Inc. didn’t exist yet. After a rush to get the paperwork lined up, Google was incorporated on September 4. Later that month, Page and Brin moved into the garage (车库) of friend Susan Wojcicki (now the CEO of YouTube), and received further investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others.

Early in 1999, Page and Brin attempted to sell Google to Excite, at the time the No. 2 search engine behind Yahoo, for one million dollars. However, even after the pair had been talked down to $750,000, Excite CEO George Bell rejected them. Page and Brin had also reportedly attempted to sell their technology to early search engines Altavista and Yahoo in 1998 but to no avail (毫无成果).

With no buyer in sight, Google started hiring engineers and moved to an office in California in March 1999. In 2001, Eric Schmidt was hired first as chairman and then CEO, leaving Page and Brin to continue developing Google’s products and technologies respectively (各自地). By the end of its first decade, Google had effectively won the search engine wars.

（选自The Guardian）

1. According to the article, the Google company was officially founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in ______.

A. August 1996

B. September 1997