亚马逊（Amazon）周三发布的新款硬件设备占据了当日各大媒体的头条。大部分媒体均在预测，亚马逊的Fire平板电脑能否抢占苹果（Apple）iPad或巴诺公司（Barnes & Noble）Nook平板的市场份额，或者两者通吃。

    但第二天，媒体却纷纷将焦点对准了另一项软件技术的潜在影响，它就是亚马逊软件工程人员为提高新款移动设备的网页加载速度而专门设计的浏览器。此前，这款浏览器并未被过多宣传，因此它的出现着实出乎所有人的意料。

    亚马逊将这款浏览器命名为Silk。亚马逊CEO杰夫•贝佐斯这款浏览器的定位就是为当今日益复杂的网页提供快速加载解决方案。他以CNN.com的主页作为典型实例说明了这个问题。CNN.com的主页包含了53张静态图片、39张动态图片、3个Flash文件、来自7个不同域名的30个JavaScript文件、29个HTML文件以及7个CSS文件。

    贝佐斯和公司工程师解释称，为了减少不合理的延迟，在手持设备中快速加载所有内容，亚马逊将任务分为两部分：一部分由平板电脑完成，但大部分工作则交给亚马逊庞大的服务器群。用户的网络请求将被发送到这里进行预处理，若有可能，可高速缓存，用于未来使用。

    周三下午，克里斯•埃斯皮诺萨在内容发布平台posterous上就亚马逊的新产品发表了一则评论，被广泛转载。他在评论中解释道：“这款浏览器的意义在于，亚马逊可以捕捉和控制Fire用户进行的每一次网络访问。他们浏览的每一个网页、访问的每一条连接、进行的每一次点击、查看的每一则广告都将通过世界上规模最庞大的服务器群组进行处理。如果还有人在对Facebook Timeline功能的数据挖掘能力赞叹不已，那亚马逊所面临的巨大机遇则会让Facebook黯然失色。目前，亚马逊已经拥有了所有公司梦寐以求的东西：客户会去其他哪些商店购物？这些商家会给出什么价格？一切都一清二楚。而且，亚马逊获取这些数据不用像谷歌（Google）一样投入巨资、费尽心思，依靠主动地抓取网页，而是通过提供一项简单的缓存服务，由Fire用户来完成抓取网页的工作，亚马逊只需守株待兔，就能获得这些信息。实际上，Fire用户成了亚马逊的‘土耳其机器人’（ Mechanical Turk）。他们义务抓取网页，然后向亚马逊提供最有价值的用户行为缓存。”

    译者：阿龙/乔树静

    The hardware Amazon (AMZN) introduced Wednesday dominated the early headlines. Most of the coverage focused on whether Amazon's Fire tablet will cut into sales of Apple's (AAPL) iPad or Barnes & Noble's (BKS) Nook or both.

    But the second-day stories have started to zero in on the implications of a less-heralded -- and more unexpected -- announcement: The special-purpose browser Amazon's software engineers have designed to speed up Web searches on their new mobile device.

    It's called Silk, and CEO Jeff Bezos pitched it as a solution to the problem of pulling up content from today's increasingly complex Web pages, using as an example a typical CNN.com home page with its 53 static images, 39 dynamic images, 3 Flash files, 30 JavaScript files from 7 different domains, 29 HTML files and 7 CSS files.

    To get all this on the screen of a hand-held device without an unreasonable delay, Bezos and his engineers explained, Amazon has split the task in two: Some of the work is done by the tablet, but most is carried out in Amazon's giant server farms, where users' Web request are sent for pre-processing and, where possible, caching for future use.

    "What this means," explained posterous' Chris Espinosa in a widely quoted commentary posted Wednesday afternoon, "is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon's opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they're being offered there. What's more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they're getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence."