"The Google brand has taken on a life of its own," concedes Jim Lanzone, the boss of Ask. com, the fourth-largest but fastest-gr

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问题     "The Google brand has taken on a life of its own," concedes Jim Lanzone, the boss of Ask. com, the fourth-largest but fastest-growing search engine, and this simultaneously frustrates and delights him. It frustrates him because people say they "Google" things even when they go to Ask or other engines to search the web; because Google is considered, for no good reason (in his opinion), "the safe choice under pressure"; and because many people "don’t seem to want choice" and stick to Google out of mere inertia.
    But it delights him, because Google, having made many enemies, must now fight many battles; and because Google, perhaps out of hubris, appears to be getting distracted. This month, for instance, Google unveiled a free online spreadsheet program, which, like many Google products, has little to do with web search and is meant to needle Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, which has a near-monopoly on spreadsheets through Excel. Google, in other words, has impressive momentum, says Mr. Lanzone, but a good martial-artist can use his opponent’s momentum to overcome him, so "we’re using search aikido."
    Yahoo!, the largest internet portal with about 400m users (of its e-mail, instant-messaging, music and other products), has come up with a strategy to differentiate its own search engine. Yahoo! has been at this game for only two years, but now has hundreds of engineers working on it. In contrast to the quasi-religious faith that Google places in its mathematical algorithms, says Eckart Walther, one of Yahoo!’s search bosses, Yahoo! is "about combining the best of people with the best of technology".
    Ask is taking a different tack. It has come up with Expert Rank, an algorithm that also ranks web pages by incoming links and links by theme. So instead of using a web page’s overall popularity to. calculate its ranking, it finds the pages that are most popular among experts on a particular subject, a method that often returns better results than Google’s. Ask also uses these thematic dusters to suggest the best ways to narrow or expand a search, a feature called "zoom" that is very popular. Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch thinks that Ask is as good as Google for general web search-- but better than Google for finding online maps and images.
    As for Microsoft, it has identified Google as a mortal threat to its business and has launched an all-out effort to catch up in online services in general, and in search in particular. Last winter, it tried to buy itself market share by negotiating with AOL for a merger-- or at least an agreement under which AOL would switch from Google’s search technology to MSN’s; but Google pre-empted Microsoft and itself took a defensive stake in AOL. Microsoft has also hired former rivals who are well respected in the industry.
What is the central idea of this passage?

选项 A、Google dominates the on-line search market.
B、Google is confronted with stiff competition.
C、Google manages to seize more market share in software business.
D、Google’s growth threatens companies like Microsoft to a large extent.

答案B

解析 本题属主旨题,问“短文的中心内容”。短文在第一段中说到Google 的发展势头令同行喜忧参半。第二段主要介绍了同行的“喜”——Google 树敌无数,这也势必拉长它的战线,分散它的注意力。第三段介绍了Google 的对手之一Yahoo!的对策:要打造有Yahoo!特色的搜索引擎。第四段说明了Ask 对Google 的挑战:即Ask 的普通网页搜索可以和Google 相媲美,其地图和图像搜索性能比Google 还要卓越。第四段指出Microsoft 在线服务和搜索方面和Google 展开激烈竞争。综上所述,
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