Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

1. CVOS Netpaths
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:11 pm

   I tried to access the site to try out one of the available 12 queries, but it is password protected. So i headed to Google, who offers a googleplex of queries.

2. Michael Arrington
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

   yes, it will be live at 3 pm…see above.

3. Cameron Olthuis
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

   Sounds more like a directory than a search engine

4. ryan
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

   4,000 results pages they created so far, I guess I can switch from Google if my query matches one of those 4,000. Idea doesn’t make sense, why would I switch from Google to this? Are these guides experts or are they just doing Google searches and picking out which results they like and then adding it?

5. RBA
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

   It looks… cute and pretty.

   From what I read, the concept seems to be a hybrid between Ask, About.com and Answers… Of course, I haven’t used it yet. But Mahalo?

6. Michael Arrington
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:19 pm

   The idea is that you are going to get Google results if you are not asking for something they’ve created results for. So if you like their results for the queries they are adding, this might be the search engine for you.

7. Chris
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:20 pm

   That is a great question how are the experts finding the content?

8. Steve S
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

   What they should add is some community feedback to round out the “expert’s wisdom”. I mean, it’s interesting if someone believes that a search is relevant. It’s far more interesting if everyone believes it is.

   Again, I am always in the Swicki camp on this one. The most effective way to use a search engine is to have users decide what is important to them. The wisdom of the crowds might be flawed, but it’s not difficult to tell if the information on the page is actually representative of what you were searching for.

   It’ll be fun to see how good these experts are, but I’m hoping a future version of the product expands on the idea a bit.

9. ryan
   

   May 30th, 2007 at 2:26 pm

   How are they getting the results though? It doesn’t sound like they are experts but just some average Joes doing searches and just adding whatever they feel fits. That’s not a very good selling point because I could get the same results from doing a query with Google. I do agree that it sounds more like a directory then a search engine. What’s next, people are going to pay to get in those top results like yahoos directory?

10. Chris
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

    Just a guess, but it sounds like something the navigators from Netscape would be doing.

11. Michael Arrington
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    Steve - there is a discussion area for every result page…as mentioned above.

12. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:38 pm

    Yes, there is a discussion area. I guess what I was seeing was more akin to Digg than to that. Where users opinions actually figure into how the results are sorted.

13. Alaska Miller
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    so a ChaCha? Squidoo’s Lens model wasn’t very popular either. Regardless, the point is to get people to use your search engine so that you can bank off of the AdSense revenue. Whatever tricks you can do to get people to do that is all that matters. It used to be sites would give out prizes for you to use their version of Google.

14. whoopee
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

    so he recreated the yahoo directory.

    do you know why the yahoo directory was killed jason? too much f#%$king content for any team of editors to handle. oh, and dead links, they tend to be a problem after about two weeks as well. then you have to rebalance your ontology every six months.

    PAIN IN THE ASS

    algorithmic search is JUST BETTER at solving this problem

15. myplaylist.biz
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    looks like another me too flop

16. G
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    I think the real plan is to SEO the hell out of this hand crafted result pages so that it appear for their respective queries in google… Jason is smart enough to know that it will never become a type-in destination site on its own.

17. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:50 pm

    That’s not a bad plan at all. Jason probably has figured out that this isn’t by any means a Google killer. It is, however, another option.

    If it is positioned as a meta-result; for example, you type in “paris hotels” and get a hand picked list of the “best sites” on paris hotels, and you can get this to show up near the top of the SERP — you certainly have something interesting.

18. Seth Finkelstein
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:54 pm

    Regarding “they are given Google results instead” - is there a formal partnership agreement with Google there? Given the involvement of Sequoia Capital, aka. Google buy-out Sugar Daddy, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is indeed a co-operative arrangement.

19. Bobby Andersen
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

    This is the “FTN” Friends TechCrunch Network. Once you are a member, your posts will never have negativity (see guy’s truemors), you will get immediate first slot status and will always have exclusive here on TC.

    Naturally Cal is in the FTN because of TC20. I wonder if we will see bashing of any of the companies that participate in the tc20 like when yahoo helped crunchgear on their home page.

    Such an interesting FTN network there is in silicon valley. It’s too bad we will never get Mr. Arrington’s real views on this or any FTN member site. That’s what made TC great.

20. Bill Worple
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    As the web continues it’s explosive growth I think people will search out services from companies like Mahalo, that provide the filtered information they’re looking for. The content for these type of sites is limited compared to google, but the content you find is relevant, and if done right, unable to be gamed.

21. ted
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

    Looks like it’s built to flip, and will be wholly dependent on Google results to bring in traffic as its too small (and unscalable) to bring in enough traffic on its own. If Google does not rate their pages highly, they will be DOA.

22. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    That seems a bit unfair. The article didn’t read like a rave review of Calcanis’ new prize pony. Now, as far as Truemors is concerned — that’s a slightly more interesting story.

    I think the idea needs work, but this is before the product even launches. My main problem with it is that every time a company relies on “experts” to decide on relevance, it is always slow and always lacks the ability to adapt.

    I think that’s what makes Web 2.0 such an interesting movement. Even if the people are almost always wrong individual, on average they make pretty decent decisions.

    Until, of course, the SEO experts start gaming the system. Hmm…

23. Allen Stern
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    #22 Steve - “seo is dead” and “seo is shit” from calacanis at ses chicago and on his own blog numerous times. So I assume SEO will play NO role in this program.

24. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    What I meant was that if the system was more like Swicki, then it leaves it open to external marketers gaming themselves to the top.

    Good point though. SEO probably won’t figure into this.

    Now I’m even more interested in what the plan really is.

25. Seth Finkelstein
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    Why would you assume that a few attention-baiting blog posts would interfere with BUSINESS?

26. sean percival
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:22 pm

    Really great idea!

    Can’t wait to see it (for some reason the password is still on).

27. Robert Dewey
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    If anyone can pull this off, it will be Jason…

28. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    It’ll definitely be interesting to see.

29. anon
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    How is this a bad move?

    40 x 20k = round to 1 mil /yr outsourced grunts doing directory work.

    slow burn and max publicity ….

30. Bill Hartzer
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    Hasn’t the “human powered search” been done before? ChaCha claims to be human-powered, as well.

    It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and if Mahalo will be able to handle the traffic.

31. Bill Hartzer
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    I just did a search for “search engine optimization”…funny how Thomas the Tank ENGINE is related to search engine optimization. My son loves Thomas but this is kind of ridiculous.

32. Jim
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

    Looks like a slightly better Squidoo.

33. sean percival
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    Its open, and its pretty slick!

    Going take some time to mature the results but I’m sure Jason has hired the right people for this job. Very nice that can recommend a link, but this is only an option for existing pages. Hopefully they will look through the logs and see which missing pages pop up the most.

34. patricia
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:46 pm

    Interesting. I’m a big fan of the development of search technologies. I think we are only just beginning with possibilities and that there will be more to come in this space.

    As for the site, it looks well thought out.

35. not impressed
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    Ha!

    I can’t even find what I’m looking for. But it gives me Google results.
    Fantastic. Hey, I have an idea. Why I don’t I just use Google instead and save myself the trouble of looking at the crappy logo with the ‘we-think-we’re-so-clever’ alpha attached? Sheesh. Calacanis, will you ever learn anything about branding or style?

    No digg.

36. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:49 pm

    Interesting, it looks like they are only looking to do the top 10,000 search terms. This might be very doable. Though, there is a question of whether the service will change with the content.

37. Bjorn
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    Yeah uh, I don’t think I could find answers to “Parser Error Message: Can not access file ‘System.Web’ because it is being used by another process.” or any other random problem I might have like I could with Google.

    This is probably more for entertainment than actual use.

38. Peter Koning
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:04 pm

    I think I heard recently that there are 1 billion searches per day on Google and over 25% are new keywords.

    How does “just the top 10k searches” fit in with longtail thinking?

39. karthik
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

    Wait a Second

    “They will ban the link, the user and the user’s IP address ‘forever’………”.
    Is it only me who sees a flaw in this???????What if someone working in IBM corporate office in NYC submits a spammy link.

    Will all the employess , who share that IP address within the network, get banned?????????

    Any thoughts??????????

40. Matt
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:15 pm

    Will About.com/NYT be after them for the use of the term “Guide” as someone who collects and organize information on the Web?

41. Allen Stern
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

    Unfortunately Mike, I think you missed a few critical points which I included in my review on Cn:
    http://www.centernetworks.com/.....cal-review

    1. They state they are only creating pages for the top 10k searches. What about the rest? They get the same ole Google. Of course Jason did a smart think and listed all the silicon valley peeps. I can only imagine that CK Sample (whomever he is, I think a buddy of Jason’s from AOL?) is not in the top 10k searches. So exactly how does one get a page made?

    2. This is the same as AboutUs except prettier. And on AboutUs, I can edit my page. So I guess the score is 1-1.

    3. This is not a human search - its more of a directory. For example, using the current definition of search, if I put “techcrunch” into the search box, I should see results that are based on something for the term across the live web. Instead I get a page about Heather Harde and Michael Arrington’s blog. That’s why I call it a directory not a search engine.

    4. How will they keep this maintained? What’s current today is out of date tomm. Goes back to #3.

    5. I might be looney, but is this not the best SEO play out there? I go into more detail on my post on Cn, but this affords a chance to get major play in Google for every term they write about. I said the same thing about AboutUs (ha) last year. So while Jason has said over and over that SEO is dead, his product is at least partially a SEO product. Interesting.

42. Stephen Sclafani
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

    Steve S,

    Your first post about the importance of SERPs was probably correct. I think Jason has seen the success Wikipedia has had and wants to duplicate that with Mahalo. And since he is paying contributors he doesn’t have the problem of being unable to monetize through ads that Wikipedia does.

43. karthik
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:22 pm

    Can someone with the TECHNICAL KNOW HOW resolve the following paradox from Mike’s review of this new Hawaiian baby

    “They will ban the link, the user and the user’s IP address ‘forever’………”.This is directly from Mike’s review

    What if someone working in IBM corporate office in NYC submits a spammy link.

    Will all the employess , who share that IP address within the network, get banned?????????

44. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

    @42 Yea, it sounds as close to being right as I’ve come up with so far.

    It looks like it can be useful, if you happen to be “surfing for fun”. The top 10,000 searches are the top 10,000 for a reason. The majority of people casually using the system will amble over to those searches at one point or another.

    The problem is that it doesn’t seem like this system is designed for casual use. It’s a specialty search service in the same way that imdb is. Think of it as akin to a buzz tracker.

    It should be an entertaining diversion though as it stands.

45. victor
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    The name does not sound to me as a better brand, so would suggest that he buys and name the site http://www.mediarati.com

46. Hans
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:46 pm

    no results for “porn”, i could get notified if results are in future available, but i need it NOW …. jason goes deadpool on this one.

47. Stephen Sclafani
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    Steve S,

    I don’t think Jason believes that Mahalo will ever be a destination search engine. Rather, like Wikipedia, IMDB, TV.com and the like, Mahalo pages will primarily be found through Google, Yahoo and Microsoft SERPs. The fact they are concentrating on the top search terms supports this.

48. bs meter
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

    Looks like Jason should return to being an “Entrepreneur in Action”
    this is frankly, a dog! you might as well throw this one in the deadpool now.

    Perhaps Jason is too young to remember but Yahoo used to be a human edited directory… in the last century. google built a better mousetrap.

    “history is doomed to repeat itself”

49. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    @47 Yea, I tend to agree.

50. Tony K
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    And what makes these people experts because the Navigators on Netscape certainly aren’t what I would call experts at all. The results are so locked down, its like you have to be a friend of the experts to get listed. I mean really look at the Weblogs Inc sites listed prominently on relevant topics. What makes their coverage any better than any other sites out there?

51. Klaus
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

    This is lame Jason

52. Markus
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    I hope it stays fair and non-biased just like ODP.

    /sarcasm

53. Ivan Pope
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

    I’ll say this for the setup - at least the fallback Google results know that when I search on ‘art’ I don’t want Artichokes or Articles or Ron Artest, but things containing a-r-t
    Sheesh, after all these years, artichokes. It’s like 1994 all over again.

54. Allen Stern
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

    #50 tony - that’s the point, or did you miss that part

55. rohan
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    It’s nice to see Calacanis has the connections to get something like this funded because this idea isn’t really groundbreaking for the most part. I’m interested in seeing how his model based on human editors is going to scale. I agree with an above poster that this thing is being built to flip.

56. Zaid
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:24 pm

    SEO has definitely got to be one of their top strategy for traffic.

    Of course Jason’s defense will be he is against THAT certain kind of SEO and not SEO that is “naturally” good(*cough* mahalo). I’m not saying I buy that but okay.

    -Zaid

57. David Ward
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:30 pm

    The way I see it, there’s room for Mahalo.com because it’s not just a search engine but it is a directory. A directory of everything popular, at least for now. I think it will be a major chore to keep the links active and the pages up to date but thats why he has 40 guides and I’m sure he’s still hiring more. The problem that this solves is relevant content that is getting more difficult to find on Google, Yahoo, Ask or any of the others. Who wants or needs 500k search results when the top 7 is probably all you need or at least it’s a great start. I like the concept and I could see some real vertical applications for this type of search directory.

58. extensions forklift
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    yeah more of a directory

    - 40 Full time employees / that sit there and make ”fav lists”

    - the idea is broken ……

    - Can executing a broken idea perfect / make it work?

    - we’ll see

59. Adam Jusko
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    Sounds a lot like Bessed.

60. Steve S
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    I think the best thing that will come out of this is a really interesting news bite and a pretty cool directory.

    Scale is definitely not the main problem, he’s only after the top 10,000.

    The problem will be keeping things relevant. If the major links are Wikipedia and Imdb like in the case of Star Wars, then OK. For more obscure topics, it’ll be more of a problem.

61. mike tyson
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:52 pm

    oh no, don’t tell me..what the hell

    translation: this sucks.

62. Googlerama
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:08 pm

    Wow you people are negative. It looks pretty helpful to me. Instead of sorting through all the crap, they have what I would likely be looking for already put together. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

63. Webomatica
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    After looking at results for a few items, while it may have more relevant results than Yahoo or Google it’s not as information rich as Wikipedia. It will be hard for a staff of humans to keep up with all the humans on the web.

64. Bobby Andersen
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    hey i have one question only…

    WHAT DOES HAMMER THINK OF THIS?

    lol

65. Tony K
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:34 pm

    But why do I care what these people think? What makes them experts? What makes their opinions matter at all? What makes Mahalo matter?

66. youtubesearcher
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:41 pm

    Hey mahalo, your logo needs better anti aliasing, looks pretty jagged, and it is your first impression…other than that I will give it a try.

67. Sprague Dawley
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    Mahalo — the Hawaiian word for “monetize”

    Calacanis has been tipping his hand about this on his blog for months, every time he tweaked Jimmy Wales for being squeamish about monetizing Wikipedia. This is his attempt to steal that prime Google front page ranking from Wikipedia and the as-yet vaporware human search engine that Wales has been touting forever. Good on him.

68. squasher98
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 8:55 pm

    How do they ensure that the results stay up-to date? With the Paris Hotels example, what happens in a year when the hotels they initially selected have different star ratings, better sites have appeared, or the prices have all tripled due to increased popularity driven by Mahalo?

    http://www.leveragingideas.com/

69. Paul Short
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

    dmoz.org meets web2.0

    Good to see an up to date directory with funding behind it though.

70. TIPS:
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:15 pm

    If you guy… Reminder never put flower logo on your startup. People will think you are a f*gg*t.

71. Ian Bell
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:20 pm

    Is Jason for real with this?

    http://www.mahalo.com/Arctic_Monkeys

    This is just a link farm….there is no REAL information here. Why would anyone use this over Wikipedia or just Google?

    Here is the recipe to this site:

    1 part Digg
    1 part Google
    1 part Wikipedia

    Add a little unoriginality and you have “Thank You” in Hawaiian??

    No wonder they gave this site such a terrible name, they better be thanking their investors for the money.

    It just goes to show that it’s about who you know, not what you can do.

72. AJ
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    how annoying is that person from center networking? Hey Stern, why don’t you write some original stuff on your blog?

73. a non
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:48 pm

    what a disappointment! Sorry.

74. haha
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    Typed in “yahoo” and get

    MediaWiki 1.9.3
    Please set up the wiki first.

    No idea what the fk is going on.

    Back to the drawing board.

75. patricia
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    I should pay closer attention (or read the whole article). I thought for some reason it was natural language search.

    I don’t know - I think it has potential but it’ll depend, like any of the other zillion start ups that have been launched. I would ditch the flower, also, and tag line.

76. haha
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    http://www.mahalo.com/Special:.....;go=Search

77. victor
    

    May 30th, 2007 at 11:35 pm

    After taking a look, I think its a concept that will work better with http://www.mediarati.com cos what I see here is more of a reference to sites, blogs and forum where one can get the relevant infomation. and this makes more sense with mediarati. Maybe I rather start looking for funding.
    Thanks Jason for the first mover intiative though.

78. Michael Tanne
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:20 am

    I usually refrain from mentioning my own company in TC comments, but in this case, I have to say ‘been there, done that’ - literally. Wink 1.0 was people powered search (Wink changed to people search recently and it’s taking off much faster).

    We found that with thousands of users and well over 5 million user-selected links we were just getting started. Results were pretty good for a lot of queries, but the tail is *really long*. As anyone with access to a query log knows, there are a small number of common queries followed by millions of queries that all seem to be different. 10K hand-crafted queries is less than 1% of the coverage of Wikipedia - and that is content, not search.

    Not sure that Calacanis has any actual search technology - this is more of a directory or guide - like About, BlueDot, Squidoo, or Fanpop. Could SEO well if they can get these guides into top results - but can be hard to SEO pages of links. Wish them luck, though - good thing they’ve got 4 years of cash.

79. Need to work hard Jason
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 1:30 am

    Why does more results linked to google search mode?

    People see it. A spam site. I think Jason Calacanis need to work harder on that search engine. I wonder if they use PHP.

    if you have VC money.

    Never… Never… Never use PHP script to write on search engine It’s not professional. Always use ASP, ASPx, Perl, and other scripts to make search engine.

80. Geoffrey Arone
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 1:41 am

    The real question, is what will it take for people to break their Google habit? I remember my first Google query almost as much as the first time I…I…I mean, seriously, though. Give me something that will do to Google, what Google did to Altavista and then I will be impressed.

81. Mahalo might copied someone's work.
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 1:45 am

    Sorry, your search engine couldn’t pick up the correct stock quote.
    Not Human powered search.

    Sooo busted!! :p

82. Paypal2u Blogger
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 2:06 am

    Human powered? How about alien powered. I’ve being seing this tags everywhere on the Net. Have they think about trademarking the tags “Human Powered”. I wonder why they didn’t until now.

    Look like “Intel Inside” is the only tags alone being trademarking.

83. powerleveling
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 2:50 am

    Thank u ,so interesting it is

84. Vishal Lamba
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 3:03 am

    it probably wont work… with semweb around the corner this is NOT a long term vision.

85. Jimmy Daniels
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 6:33 am

    I didn’t think Google listed other search engines results to start with? If I were them, I wouldn’t count on Google traffic for too long, unless they decide to call it what it is, a directory.

86. sami
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 7:54 am

    Humans makes more mistakes than machines.

87. dave
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 8:09 am

    good lord, why are you blowing sunshine up this company’s ass? honestly, are “internet users everywhere” really searching for “michael arrington”?

88. pablo
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 8:31 am

    I like how at the bottom of the site they say “What is Mahalo? Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine.”

    Ummmm… didn’t ChaCha do it first??

89. Josef
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 8:41 am

    I temp’t at Looksmart when the bubble unemployed alot of us in San Francisco.
    Hand curated search. This feels like Looksmart with better 2.0 tools.
    Music results (at least at the band level) feel like FoxyTunes Planet.

90. Nick Tan
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 8:50 am

    Looks like a scraper to me. Might end up in the Google SERPs just like the junk they supposedly want to filter out.

91. w2i
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 9:16 am

    Reading through the information about mahalo.com it somehow provokes me to mention about http://NosyJoe.com, which is yet another –not as ambitious but– interesting example (although still in private beta) of a social search engine that relies on humans (nosy preferably :-)) to build up its index massive. It offsets the low quality content by extracting only the meaningful and grammatical components of the content and further organizes the information into phrasal and keyword based tags. From what I have seen on the site so far it also appears to me that it mashes-up, ranks and shares the information in an interesting manner, although I do not quite understand how, by applying a set of algorithms and user patterns, as they claim. The Nosy Joes also seem to believe in the fundament that humans do it better

92. Scott
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 10:01 am

    While I understand why one might think human powered search will provide better results than an algorithm, I just don’t see it happening to provide any rich value to obtain good results about something that’s hard to find otherwise.

    This is not a search engine. It’s kind of like the Yahoo Directory was back in 1995, only prettier and with less information.

    Maybe it’s too early to tell, but if Jason doesn’t have something else up his sleeve on this one, I don’t see it lasting too long.

93. Ron Pereira
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 10:07 am

    Ok, let me annoy by saying - been there done that. Hats off to Josef, you worked on our failed product.

    This concept was tried at LookSmart as we attempted to maintain our relationship with MSN in the early 2000s.

    First of all some background. What Mahalo does is Exactly what MSN did for the better part of their early existence. They had a tiered results structure. First, goto/overture, then human edited results (for top queries), then the LookSmart directory, then Inktomi. If there were no human edited results, or LookSmart results, then just Inktomi. The human edited results which MSN called synsets were handled by a team of mostly library professionals in Redmond. They firmly believed in this approach but couldn’t hold off the “index and algorithm” folks.

    We at LookSmart thought we could help MSN maintain that high quality hand touch segment of queries by building out a more complete infrastructure to handle the “head” of the query stream. Note: We used “long tail” quite a bit in 2002 as we realized that MOST queries are one word and high volume, but HIGH value queries were in the “long tail”. If I had only acted on that after MSN let us go….

    Look at LookSmart’s stock price and you’ll see how it ended.

    As josef alludes to above. Employee CHURN is an issue. I am sure Mahalo and their smart investors have thought through it, but there really isn’t a career path for a SERP optimization specialist…

    Like anything, this CAN be done. It is enough to carve out 1% market share and be worth a billion dollars (see Don Dodge’s blog for that reference)? It’s more of a marketing question.

    All I know is that the Algorithm really killed LookSmart and hand edited results in 2003.

94. Paul
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 10:55 am

    So old world media is dead. I don’t need self-styled professional journalists to research and write meaningful content for me to read. I can just go “find it” at Google without having to pay a dime. Hmm, but now I need to filter it a bit because there’s just too much of it. Hey, I know let’s go to Mahalo where a bunch of college dropouts have done some web surfing/taken a bung to promote the most important information for me.

    That works. Much better than someone who actually knows what they’re doing, and who’s out of work now anyway.

    The Cult of the Amateur rules again.

95. MARK KLEIN MD
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 11:26 am

    This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. If Jason Calcanis and Guy Kawasaki had a baby, it would suggest combining Boo and Pets.com for a super domain of suck.

96. Anand
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 11:57 am

    Looks too technical for a layman user..Besides, why would I care to provide my email and then go back and enter a webpage link? Not unless I have my site for a particular keyword, and in that case, all we shall have are spam-type links..

    I would prefer http://sproose.com/ to this anyday..

97. bs meter
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    thoroughly unimpressed…

98. Mr. Kennedy
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    Thoroughly don’t care what bs meter thinks.

99. Vincent McBurney
    

    May 31st, 2007 at 9:33 pm

    I don’t understand why people are questioning the expertise of the site editors. It is obvious from looking at a few topics that they are experts - experts on US sports, US television, US movies, US food, Bollywood actors and places US holidaymakers can visit when they are overseas.

    They have the Democrat Party but not the British Conservative Party, a search on Football takes you to an NFL page, they have Kirk Cameron but not Alec Guinness, they have Gsa Gsa Gabor but not Charles Dickens. They have Clinton but a search for Kohl - chancellor of Germany during reunification - takes me to a page about eyeliner. Now that’s quality search right there.

    Am I the only person insulted by the US ring fencing in this site?

100. Jason
     

     May 31st, 2007 at 11:36 pm

     Vincent (#99): forgive us for being so US centric. This is a huge project and just getting the top 10,000 terms in the US done is going to take us a year. We’re going to do the best we can to be non-US centric in the future… provided we can proof the model out in the US market!!!

     RonP (#93): Thanks so much for the background on LookSmart and MSN. Obviously we did our homework and know all about the history of GNN, Michael Wolf, LookSmart, ODP/DMOZ, ResultsAbout, About.com, and the Yahoo Directory. However, we believe that a LOT has changed since that time. First, machine-based search is suffering from an overload of both good, bad, and horrible sites fighting it out for placement. Users are getting frustrated and you can see that when you do a search for any product, travel, or health search. It’s a mess. Also, there is a way to make money today and in 1996-2001 there really wasn’t. Also, people are spending more and more time searching. What we’re doing is going to be years of hard work, and I do think that churn of the Guides is going to be a challenge… however, I had 300 bloggers at Weblogs, Inc. and many of them are still blogging away at sites like Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq–three years later! We are at this for the long term and if you come back in six months I think you’ll see the product really improve.

101. Avi
     

     June 1st, 2007 at 2:02 pm

     Jason,

     Do you plan on actually writing your own software or are you going to continue using mediawiki to power mahalo. Also why do you think editorialized content or guides for search results is more meaningful then Google (algorithmic results) or user-generated results?

     Also, you guys should look into locking down mediawiki even further as with some clever url editing, you can get to some pages I’m sure you don’t want users to see.

102. Dan
     

     June 1st, 2007 at 2:03 pm

     Jason- How do you plan to keep this from turning into the ultra-corrupt enviorment that the DMOZ ( http://www.dmoz.org ) currently is in? If it gets to any decent size in traffic, sought out keywords like viagra, mortgages and other terms would be sought out after, and would likely be biased.

103. Jason
     

     June 1st, 2007 at 5:46 pm

     Dan (102): Right now all our Guides are fulltime staff and they all agree with the mission of helping users. The reason why folks at DMOZ started selling links IMHO is that they were putting in a lot of time and getting no compensation. The same thing happened at digg–folks working for free are going to be easier to corrupt than ones who are getting paid (sort of like underpaid government workers). Also, if someone on our staff was to take a bribe we would fire them–just the NYT or WSJ or PBS would.

     Avi (101): Right now MediaWiki is doing just fine for us. We are going to see how it goes and customize the software as we go. We know about some of the easter eggs and if people can find them that’s fine with us. Editorial content is better than Google because we use a human to a) take out all the spam, b) organize the links, and c) look for things that are not obvious (i.e. give context). Also, it’s not Google vs. a Mahalo Guide. it’s Google vs. a Mahalo Guide using Google, Ask, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Wikipedia and dozens of other quality services.

     Mahalo for the feedback!

     Jason

104. dabu
     

     June 6th, 2007 at 7:11 am

     This is similar to mahalo - http://en.dabu.pl

     However, it is more extended in polish version - http://dabu.pl

105. Bernard
     

     June 13th, 2007 at 8:30 am

     Is it the “world’s first human powered search?” Naver.com, in South Korea, has had it’s “knowledge” search for years.