The official tags provided by Go Search directly addressed the need for information authenticity among both business professionals and ordinary internet users.
It seemed that no public webpage on the Internet was beyond Go Search's reach.
In a computer laboratory at UC Berkeley, Eric was studying Go Search's ranking logic.
He typed several obscure C-language terms into the search box and watched the resulting list of pages.
"Their web crawlers have an incredibly broad reach," Eric told his roommate, who was standing behind him. "Almost any publicly available webpage on the Internet seems to be indexed."
"And the ranking mechanism is very clear," he added.
His roommate leaned in to look at the screen for a moment.
"The current retrieval and matching mechanism still can't handle complex, natural language long sentences," his roommate pointed out, noting a technical limitation. "If you enter a full, long question, the system will only break the sentence down into individual keywords and then match webpages containing those words. The results will be somewhat inaccurate."
"But that's already enough," Eric said, switching to a few different search terms. "For internet users at this stage, precise keyword matching is the most common requirement."
As long as the keywords were entered accurately, the most relevant webpages would be ranked first. There were almost no omissions.
More importantly, there was their handling of large enterprises and major websites.
Eric typed in Microsoft's English name.
The first result was Microsoft's official website, featuring a prominent official badge and the full name of the parent company.
Only after that came news articles and forum posts discussing vulnerabilities in Microsoft's operating system.
This eliminated interference from similar-sounding but irrelevant information.
Eric pointed to the official badge.
"Technically, achieving this weight bias isn't difficult," he said. "The hard part is verifying the identity of the entity behind the website."
Redwood City, Silicon Valley Online Headquarters.
Frank sat at the head of the conference table. On either side sat the head of the Search Business Department and the supervisor of the Review Team.
The projection screen displayed the growth curve of search requests.
With the portal website's daily clicks exceeding 100 million, the search box's usage frequency was rising exponentially.
The head of the Search Business Department was delivering a routine report.
"Users have already gotten into the habit of directly using our search function when they can't find specific information. This is currently the fastest-responding and most comprehensive search engine on the market."
Frank looked at the data report and nodded slightly.
The supervisor of the Review Team spoke next, his voice heavy with obvious exhaustion.
"Mr. Marshall, the Manual Review Department is at its breaking point."
The supervisor flipped open the logbook in his hand.
"To ensure the accuracy of official labels in our search results, our reviewers must process thousands of business and institutional qualification documents every day. They have to verify business registration information, make phone calls to confirm official domain ownership, and even weed out counterfeit websites attempting to obtain official labels by providing forged materials."
In an era where algorithms could not yet independently discern the true authority of a webpage, Silicon Valley Online had adopted a manual intervention approach.
This process consumed a massive amount of labor.
The supervisor laid out the practical difficulties.
"The Finance Department has questioned our ever-increasing recruitment budget. Someone suggested we relax the review standards or simply abolish the official labels altogether and let the machine algorithms handle word-frequency ranking."
The conference room fell silent.
The engineers responsible for the technology also turned their gaze to Frank.
Maintaining such a large manual review team was indeed a heavy burden within a technology-driven company in Silicon Valley.
Frank set down the report in his hand and clasped his fingers on the table.
"I will discuss the budget with the Finance Department," Frank said, looking at the review supervisor and giving a definitive answer.
"Not only will the Review Team not be disbanded, but we will also continue to expand it. Hire as many people as you need."
The supervisor breathed a sigh of relief.
Frank stood up and walked to the whiteboard in the conference room.
"Information on the Internet is growing exponentially every day."
Frank picked up a marker.
"In the future, there will be more and more content online, making it harder to distinguish truth from falsehood. Our webdriver relies on manual directory classification to organize the Internet, but as the number of webpages increases, manual classification is bound to fall behind. Our crawler technology has solved the problems of indexing breadth and speed, but the side effect of breadth is information overload and the proliferation of false information."
He turned around and looked at everyone in the conference room.
"Machine algorithms can match words and calculate word frequency, but they cannot yet determine whether the company behind a website is legally registered or whether it is the actual entity that netizens are truly looking for. At this point, our manual labeling becomes the final line of defense."
Frank placed the marker in the whiteboard tray.
"Although this part of the work requires manual labeling, the effort is worth it. We are building user trust in Go Search. When netizens find that the homepages of major companies and important websites they find through us all have clear official labels and full company names, they won't have to worry about being misled by similar-looking information. This experience is irreplaceable."
The time entered the height of summer in 1996.
As search results grew more accurate and the coverage of official labels expanded, Go Search's authority in the minds of netizens began to rise imperceptibly.
It was no longer just a supplementary feature on the go.com portal, but was gradually becoming the foundational tool for netizens to explore the virtual world.
Those users who were accustomed to chatting on forums and reading news in the news section, when encountering any questions in work or life, no longer had their first reaction to be to flip through physical materials or ask others for help, but to cast their eyes toward that clean input box at the top of the screen.
Wall Street analysts began using a company's official Go Search verification badge as an informal benchmark for assessing the legitimacy of internet startups in their research reports.
Traditional business owners also noticed this shift. They began proactively contacting Silicon Valley Online's review department, submitting tedious piles of documentation just to secure that authoritative badge in search results.
In an era of burgeoning information overload, Silicon Valley Online had established a structured system of trust amidst the chaos of the internet, combining a rigorous machine algorithm with human review.
Once formed, the habits of internet users are hard to break.
Through this search box, Silicon Valley Online embedded itself deeper into the very infrastructure of the internet.
June 1996.
On the eastern shore of the Pacific, Wall Street traders and Silicon Valley engineers were locked in a carnival of capital and technology, centered on Silicon Valley Online's stock ticker and traffic data.
Meanwhile, on the western shore in Japan, another summer carnival—this one for video game players—had already quietly begun.
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