????亞馬遜（Amazon）周三發布的新款硬件設備占據了當日各大媒體的頭條。大部分媒體均在預測，亞馬遜的Fire平板電腦能否搶占蘋果（Apple）iPad或巴諾公司（Barnes & Noble）Nook平板的市場份額，或者兩者通吃。

????但第二天，媒體卻紛紛將焦點對準了另一項軟件技術的潛在影響，它就是亞馬遜軟件工程人員為提高新款移動設備的網頁加載速度而專門設計的瀏覽器。此前，這款瀏覽器并未被過多宣傳，因此它的出現著實出乎所有人的意料。

????亞馬遜將這款瀏覽器命名為Silk。亞馬遜CEO杰夫?貝佐斯這款瀏覽器的定位就是為當今日益復雜的網頁提供快速加載解決方案。他以CNN.com的主頁作為典型實例說明了這個問題。CNN.com的主頁包含了53張靜態圖片、39張動態圖片、3個Flash文件、來自7個不同域名的30個JavaScript文件、29個HTML文件以及7個CSS文件。

????貝佐斯和公司工程師解釋稱，為了減少不合理的延遲，在手持設備中快速加載所有內容，亞馬遜將任務分為兩部分：一部分由平板電腦完成，但大部分工作則交給亞馬遜龐大的服務器群。用戶的網絡請求將被發送到這里進行預處理，若有可能，可高速緩存，用于未來使用。

????周三下午，克里斯?埃斯皮諾薩在內容發布平臺posterous上就亞馬遜的新產品發表了一則評論，被廣泛轉載。他在評論中解釋道：“這款瀏覽器的意義在于，亞馬遜可以捕捉和控制Fire用戶進行的每一次網絡訪問。他們瀏覽的每一個網頁、訪問的每一條連接、進行的每一次點擊、查看的每一則廣告都將通過世界上規模最龐大的服務器群組進行處理。如果還有人在對Facebook Timeline功能的數據挖掘能力贊嘆不已，那亞馬遜所面臨的巨大機遇則會讓Facebook黯然失色。目前，亞馬遜已經擁有了所有公司夢寐以求的東西：客戶會去其他哪些商店購物？這些商家會給出什么價格？一切都一清二楚。而且，亞馬遜獲取這些數據不用像谷歌（Google）一樣投入巨資、費盡心思，依靠主動地抓取網頁，而是通過提供一項簡單的緩存服務，由Fire用戶來完成抓取網頁的工作，亞馬遜只需守株待兔，就能獲得這些信息。實際上，Fire用戶成了亞馬遜的‘土耳其機器人’（ Mechanical Turk）。他們義務抓取網頁，然后向亞馬遜提供最有價值的用戶行為緩存。”

????譯者：阿龍/喬樹靜

????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."