Bài thực hành nghe Tiếng Anh nâng cao - Bài 14 - Thẩm Tâm Vy - Năm 2018 (Có âm thanh)

 Thẩm Tâm Vy, November 16th, 2018 PRACTISE LISTENING – ADVANCED - LESSON 14 
PRACTISE LISTENING 14 – ADVANCED 
Presenter: Internet browsing is not conceivable without search engines - the various 
web pages which help us find our way around the stupendous amount of cyber-locations 
in the world wide web. And, since the early nineties, hundreds of search engines have 
come and gone. One, however, has achieved a kind of success that even New-Tech 
giants Microsoft are envious of: its name has become synonymous with the verb 
"search". Anna Mills has the report. 
Anna Mills: He may seem the most powerful man on the planet, but Bill Gates has not 
yet managed the ultimate achievement in the New Technology industry: turning a 
product into a common word. The first such honour is falling to Google, the Internet 
search engine devised by two Stanford PhD nerds, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 
 The success of Google has come about through the most timeless form of marketing: 
word of mouth. The site has for some time been the default tool for millions of people 
looking for anything they want to find online, from obscure quotations to brass lamps. 
And there are increasing signs that the business is growing a commercial sharpness to 
match the blade it uses to cut through Internet junk. Last week, Google secured a place 
as the Internet search engine for America Online, the world's largest service provider, 
capping its stealthy rise to the top. 
 But its success stretches far beyond the world of the Internet. In these dog days of the 
long university summer break, I was up in the nearly deserted university library when I 
heard one professor say to another, "Me, I'm just googling around". I knew what he 
meant. It wasn't that he was totally idle, but he wasn't really engaged in sharply focused 
research, either. He was following leads from one source to another, happily wandering 
through the archive, not knowing quite what he would find next. 
 Google - the search engine favoured by most academics - seems destined to be one of 
those proprietory labels that becomes a word, a brand (like Hoover) that loses its initial 
capital letter. And the word itself is, slowly but surely, replacing the verb "to browse", 
the paper-based metaphor that electronic catalogues use, as if you were fingering the 
spines at some antiquarian bookstall. "Googling" is a different kind of sampling, 
coming across relevant findings amongst an impossibly huge amount of information. 
 The company name is a corruption of "googol", spelt g - double o-g-o-l, the word 
apparently coined by the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward 
Kasner to refer to the number represented by one followed by 100 zeros, back in the 
1940s. Little did he know that in the early 21
st
 century, the use of the term would 
become so commonplace amongst academics and laymen alike.