Passage 56
学霸导读 “谷歌”这个名字是怎么来的？它的背后有着怎样的创业故事？
In the summer of 1995， a second-year graduate student named Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective （ 未来的 ） students， when he met Larry Page， an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan.
“We both found each other obnoxious （ 可憎的 ），” 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 m 1 that people could tell where a webpage is linked to just by reading its code. However, to get a c 2 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 task that r 3 extremely complex mathematics， which was where the math prodigy （ 奇才 ） Brin came in.
In 1996， Page and Brin c 4 up with the PageRank algorithm （ 算法 ） —a ranking system which would prove to be a breakthrough idea. The algorithm was designed to check if the links 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 m 5 the web grew， the better BackRub got.
In August 1996, BackRub became Google, a play on the term “googol”, meaning “10100”. The system successfully e 6 users to search all 24 million pages stored in its database.
After getting its f irst funding from Andy Bechtolsheim， co-founder of Sun Microsystems， “Google Inc.” was incorporated （ 成立 ） on September 4， 1998. Later that month， Page and Brin m 7 into the garage of friend Susan Wojcicki （ now the CEO of YouTube ）， and received further investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos， among others.
Early in 1999， Excite CEO George Bel refused to buy Google at $750，000. Page and Brin had attempted to sell their t 8 to early search engines Altavista and Yahoo in 1998 but to no avail （ 不成功 ）.
With no buyer in sight, Google started hiring engineers and moved to an off ice in California in March 1999. In 2001, Eric Schmidt joined Google as chairman and then CEO, leaving Page and Brin to c 9 developing Google’s products and technologies respectively. By the end of its f irst decade, Google had e 10 won the search engine wars.
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6.__________7.__________8.__________9.__________10.__________
高频词汇
jokingly /'dʒəʊkɪŋli/ adv. 开玩笑地；闹着玩地
qualify /'kwɒlɪfaɪ/ v. 使合格；使具备资格
respectively /rɪ'spektɪvli/ adv. 分别；各自