Hong Kong variety show: The mastermind behind the scenes is emerging.

On the last weekend of December, it rained lightly on Hong Kong Island.

The Rolls-Royce drove smoothly over Garden Road and slowly climbed the winding mountain road.

He Wen sat in the back seat, his back ramrod straight, his hands neatly placed on his knees, his palms sweaty. This was his first time sitting in a Rolls-Royce, and also the most expensive car he had ever ridden in—but he was completely oblivious to the luxury and comfort of the top-of-the-line leather seats.

Because his mind was a complete mess.

To be honest, he knew beforehand that his cousin had married a young, wealthy man. She would occasionally mention it at family gatherings, only saying that her husband was a businessman and a very good person.

He Wen didn't ask any further questions, thinking that there were plenty of rich people in Hong Kong. His cousin was only twenty-three, and her husband was probably under thirty. He was probably a first-generation entrepreneur or a second-generation rich kid with a net worth of several hundred million.

Last night, my cousin called and asked me to come over to her house tomorrow. She gave me an address: Luk Family Estate on Victoria Peak.

He Wen almost dropped his phone at that moment.

Lu Chen! Chairman of Jiahe Group, founder of Longteng Technology, and a new leader among Hong Kong's Chinese business community. The name that appears most frequently on newspaper front pages and television news, the man he dreamed of meeting when he started his business—is he his cousin-in-law?

To be honest, when he confided in his cousin, his original intention was simply to ask her for advice and to pull some strings to see if he could save his hard work.

The current situation is that the problem seems to be solved, and even the person who created the problem is about to be dealt with.

He Wen was a little dazed. The scenery outside the window was rushing past, with villas on the hillside passing by one after another. His eyes were fixed on the outside of the window, but his mind was blank, and he couldn't see anything.

"Mr. He, we've arrived," the driver said softly from the front seat.

He Wen came to his senses and realized that the car had stopped in front of a wide wrought iron gate. The gateposts were decorated with exquisite patterns, and the two doors were slowly sliding open to the sides.

The convoy drove into the estate, circled a stone water feature, followed the edge of the neatly trimmed lawn, and finally stopped in front of a slightly futuristic main building.

He took a deep breath, straightened his clothes, and then pushed open the car door.

"Awen!"

He Min was wearing a light purple dress today. When she saw him get out of the car, she smiled and waved to him.

He Wen quickly waved in response, but his gaze involuntarily drifted to the man standing next to He Min—Lu Chen.

Lu Chen was wearing a light gray cashmere sweater, the sleeves casually rolled up to his elbows. He looked much younger and more approachable than in the newspaper photos. He smiled when he saw He Wen: "Wen, welcome."

"Mr. Lu—" He Wen's tongue stammered, his mind blank. He opened his mouth, but the words he wanted to say were stuck in his throat. In the end, he could only squeeze out, "Hello, Mr. Lu, no, no, hello, brother-in-law..."

He wanted to slap himself as soon as he finished speaking. This was the renowned Mr. Lu! How could he be so abrupt…

However, Lu Chen didn't mind at all. Instead, he was amused by Lu Chen's words: "Calling me brother-in-law is fine too. It makes us seem closer. Come in, it's windy outside."

He Min also came over with a smile and patted He Wen's arm: "Don't be nervous, Chen is very easy to talk to. Come on, let's go inside and talk."

He Wen nodded blankly, his steps faltering slightly as he passed Lu Chen.

He secretly pinched his palm—it hurt, it wasn't a dream.

……

As the two entered the main building, He Wen suddenly stopped. He stood in the lobby with his mouth agape and his head tilted back, like a child visiting the city for the first time.

The interior style of the main building was completely different from the mansion he had imagined. There was no mahogany furniture, no magnificent chandeliers, and no antique vases.

The lobby boasts an exceptionally high ceiling, with one entire wall made of floor-to-ceiling glass featuring an electrically operated color-changing process, offering unobstructed views of the surrounding mountains and Victoria Harbour. Thin LED strips are embedded in the ceiling, automatically illuminating as people walk by, as if by magic.

In the center of the hall sat a set of light-colored sofas with simple and smooth lines. On the coffee table stood a silver-gray cylinder with a blue light shining from the top; it was unclear what kind of device it was.

"This is—" He Wen murmured.

"A smart home system," Lu Chen said casually as he walked ahead, "is all developed by Longteng Technology. Voice-controlled lighting, the Five Constants system, security linkage, all centrally located on the main unit in the study. You have a computer background, so you should be able to figure it out."

He Wen not only saw through the trick, but he also felt that his understanding had been completely overturned!

This is 1987! In the entire Hong Kong Island, only a handful of households have air conditioning, and the internet is still in the extremely primitive and inefficient dial-up stage. Yet, my brother-in-law's estate already boasts a fully-fledged smart home control system that seems straight out of a science fiction movie…

He Wen followed behind Lu Chen, walking and looking around, his eyes darting everywhere.

Hidden speakers are embedded in the walls on both sides of the corridor, and the motion-sensor floor lights turn on and off wherever you step.

He Wen was certain that if this system were put on the market, the world's richest people would be scrambling to buy it. Of course, it would probably only be affordable for the super-rich.

"Alright, there will be plenty of opportunities to see it later." He Min smiled and pulled him along. "The study is over here."

……

The layout of the study on the second floor is very simple. There is a large desk by the window, on which sits a Longteng computer.

The computer was clearly a custom-made version, with a simpler design than any other model on the market—a pure black desktop paired with a large monitor. A desk lamp sat on the corner of the table, its light focused into a circle and illuminating the surface.

He Min poured a cup of tea for each of them, then quietly retreated to the sofa next to them and sat down without disturbing them.

Lu Chen sat down at his desk and tapped a few keys. A webpage lit up on the screen—a blue and white background with the words "Hong Kong Island Online" at the top, followed by neatly organized categories: Sports, Finance, Novels, Forums, Shopping, Lifestyle…

He Wen's heart skipped a beat.

That was the website he created, "Hong Kong Island Online," which he painstakingly typed out line after line of code over countless nights! He could even draw the homepage layout with his eyes closed, even though this achievement has now been forcibly suppressed and seized by Li Jiameng...

"I've seen your website," Lu Chen pointed to the screen and nodded in approval. "It's very well done and very innovative. The categorization logic is clear, and it's incredibly easy for users to get started. At this point in time, no one else in the world has even thought of this concept."

He Wen's face flushed red, from the base of his neck all the way to the tips of his ears.

He had fantasized countless times that if he were ever fortunate enough to meet Lu Chen, he would definitely present his proud "Hong Kong Island Online" to this tech godfather, which was his most cherished masterpiece.

And now, this legendary figure is sitting right in front of him, saying "Well done" to him personally—in that instant, all the grievances, suppression, and hardships of staying up all night that he had suffered over the past year vanished.

"But!" Lu Chen changed the subject.

He Wen's heart also jumped.

"Your plan has one major problem," Lu Chen leaned back in his chair, tapping his finger lightly on the table. "Essentially, Hong Kong Island Online is still a 'website directory' that relies on manual editing. All your current website inclusions are reviewed by the editorial team and then manually categorized into the corresponding directories."

He pointed to the category tree on the screen: "For example, someone created a website for NBA game schedules and submitted a link to 'Hong Kong Island Online.' Your editor has to manually open the website, review the content, confirm that there are no problems, and then categorize it under the 'Sports > Basketball > NBA' category."

He Wen nodded. This was exactly the model he had been operating in—he had previously hired ten editors whose daily work consisted of reviewing, classifying, and organizing.

Since there aren't many high-quality websites yet, ten people can barely keep up with the workload.

"At this stage, the internet isn't fully widespread yet, so you can review them one by one without any problem," Lu Chen said, looking at him. "But have you considered what you'll do as the number of websites on Longteng.com grows exponentially?"

"I..." He Wen opened his mouth, but his voice lacked confidence, "...hire more people?"

"Hiring more people?" Lu Chen chuckled. "By then, there will be tens of thousands, even millions, of websites. The labor costs alone will bankrupt you. Besides, manual review has its limits—how many websites can one person review in a day? Fifty? A hundred? The rate of data expansion will always outpace your recruitment speed."

He Wen fell silent.

He had considered this problem before; when he was working on Hong Kong Island Online, he had a vague feeling that this path wouldn't lead to long-term success. But he didn't have a better solution—in 1987, a technological wasteland, what else could he do besides manual sorting?

"I know what you're thinking," Lu Chen said. "You think there's no other way, but there is."

He Wen suddenly raised his head.

"When you were writing your graduation thesis," Lu Chen looked at him, "you cited references, right?"

He Wen was taken aback for a moment, then nodded: "Of course... all graduation theses must have references, citing the sources—"

"Yes," Lu Chen interrupted him, "the rule in academia is: the more other papers cite a paper, especially the higher-quality papers that cite it, the more important the paper is. Can this logic be applied to the internet?"

He Wen was stunned. His mind raced, as if something was faintly glowing in the darkness.

"The more links a webpage has to other webpages, especially high-quality ones, the more important that webpage is," Lu Chen explained to him in detail. "We can write an automated web crawler program to crawl data from the entire web around the clock, and then build a mathematical model to automatically calculate the quality and ranking of each webpage."

"Automatic web crawling and algorithmic sorting, along with metrics such as user clicks and external links, can reduce your labor costs to near zero."

He Wen's eyes shone with an indescribable brilliance!

He suddenly stood up, completely forgetting his nervousness, frantically rummaged through his pocket for a pen, looked around, grabbed a blank sheet of paper from the corner of the table, and began to write rapidly.

"Crawler...scraping...citation..." he muttered to himself as he wrote, his pen flying across the paper. "Right, right, how come I didn't think of that...links are citations, the more citations, the more important..."

His mind was like a floodgate, with one idea after another popping up: "We can also combine user click data to build a weight model... What if we add an indexing mechanism..."

Lu Chen didn't interrupt him, but picked up his teacup and took a sip.

He Min sat beside her, watching her cousin hunched over her husband's desk, writing furiously, and a slight smile curved her lips. She was both pleased that Awen's career had regained its luster and proud of her husband's exceptional talent.

"Besides that, this model has another obvious advantage." Lu Chen waited for him to finish taking notes, put down his teacup, and continued.

He Wen raised his head, his eyes filled with an extreme thirst for knowledge and technology.

"The search box on Hong Kong Island Online can only find websites in your own directory. Your database has a maximum of a few hundred sites. But if it's the portal website 2.0 model that I proposed, we can build a huge global web page index and crawl all the websites on Longteng.com."

He Wen paused, his hand holding the pen still, lost in deeper thought: "...No, it's not just about crawling website homepages. With a slight optimization of the algorithm, the crawler can search for text content hidden in deep links, extract keywords, and build an index. Even if a user searches for an extremely obscure long-tail keyword, they can get precise results instantly."

When Lu Chen heard that He Wen not only understood his thoughts but was even actively extending them, a hint of surprise flashed in his eyes: This kid might really be able to usher in a new era of the Internet.

In fact, the concept proposed by Lu Chen is the core algorithm mechanism of PageRank, which is the foundation of Google's success in the world.

To use a vivid analogy, if Hong Kong Island Online (or the Yahoo model) is like a "department store in the Internet age"—displaying all the goods on the counter for people to choose from; then Google's search engine is like a "super intelligent navigation system in the Internet age"—it assumes that users know exactly what they want, and then uses powerful algorithms and engineering infrastructure to deliver users to their destination at an unprecedented speed.

Department stores have opening hours, shelf space limits, and labor costs; while intelligent navigation only requires algorithms, computing power, and data.

By the end, He Wen's breathing had become rapid. He stared at Lu Chen, as if trying to etch every word the man had said into his mind.

"I've assembled a team to start developing this project," Lu Chen said, taking a document from his drawer and pushing it in front of He Wen. "I've decided on a name: Dragon Search. I hope you'll lead this project."

He Wen was stunned.

He looked down at the document, reached out his hand, lightly touched the paper with his fingertips, then withdrew it, as if afraid of getting it dirty.

"I...my boss?" His voice was hoarse. "Brother-in-law Lu, I...I only graduated a year ago, I—"

"You created the world's first portal website just one year after graduation, how can you not deserve it?" Lu Chen interrupted him. "Besides, do you think I would misjudge someone?"

He Wen's Adam's apple bobbed violently. He opened his mouth, a thousand words surging in his chest, but in the end, they all turned into silent shock, and he nodded heavily!

"This is...the greatest honor of my life!" When He Wen said this, his voice still trembled slightly, but he pronounced each word with unwavering determination.

Lu Chen stood up and patted him on the shoulder: "That's good."

He turned to He Min and said, "Min, go get two cups. It's such a wonderful moment, it would be a shame to just drink tea. We should have a toast."

"Okay~"

He Min smiled and responded, then asked the maid to bring over two whiskey glasses, opened a bottle of liquor, and poured some.

The amber-colored liquid swirled in the glass, and when the light shone through, it looked like a piece of melted honey.

He Wen stood up and took the wine glass with both hands. He glanced at Lu Chen, then at his cousin, and then raised his glass to clink against Lu Chen's.

"Brother-in-law, thank you."

"We're family, no need to be so polite," Lu Chen raised his glass and clinked it with his. "Cheers."

He Wen tilted his head back and downed the drink in one gulp. The spiciness of the whiskey burned down his throat, and he choked a little, but he smiled; he hadn't been this happy in a long time.

Lu Chen put down his wine glass, looked at him, and said, "By the way—although we have to do the new project, we can't just let the grievances you suffered go unpunished. Don't worry, I'll help you get your Hong Kong Island Online account back."

He Wen stopped holding the empty cup.

He looked at Lu Chen. Outside the window, the afternoon sun slanted into the study, falling on the desk and making the project plan with "Dragon Search" printed on it shine.

He suddenly felt a slight sting in his nose, but he held back, simply nodding vigorously with an unwavering gaze.