We can’t win every battle, but I think there is a place in the world for what we are doing.

best j

(Tony lives!)

sorry. if you want to play the optics game, that ‘purchase number’ is nice to look at…but if you bother to look at how money is made then you’ll be reading a different story…

Have to note this comment– About.com is currently a top 25 web property, and sold to Primedia in the last bubble for $700m.

If that happened again, say 2 years from now, Mr. Calacanis would net something like (guessing wildly here) $150m, a far sight better then then $15m net for Weblogs Inc.

Thanks for the shout out - I’m a product manager at Kosmix, and if you’ve looked at our pages recently, you’ll see very clearly that we’ve built a content categorization engine - if you think that sounds wonky, check out http://www.kosmix.com/Health/anemia-s. We create categories in an algorithmic fashion and are able to expose “related topics” for a particular keyword. An example of a related topic is cystic fibrosis ==> burkholderia, a highly unobvious semantic leap that GOOG and others (and Mahalo) cannot expose. Give it a whirl!

Slow search is something where I’m ok with the result coming back in say 5 days, but in summary and aggregate form. Basically outsourced research and summarization.

That doesnt mean though that it would be mapped to the most common terms that people would search for, in fact, the idea is that it would be relevant for people trying to find collective information on a specialized topic. I have mentioned this in the linked-in response to Jason’s question, and I still assert — Mahalo should make it really easy for people to do this, by providing a clippings and other similar facility that can be edited, reviewed and approved for inclusion easily.

Isn’t this what wikia is doing, and how often does Google return results with pages from find articles and zoominfo.

Google might not like it, but something that is edited can have a value beyond automated algorithmic results.

If there’s a way to filter spammers and hustlers. It could sit well alongside wikipedia and digg.

Also, when people dismiss Mr. Calacanis for using monetary gain, they forget that , yes while it may be more natural for people to come to your community, all the successful communities on the web have generally taken years and years to reach critical-mass, whereas Jason is an entrepreneur who know that money is a primary motive for most of the worlds people, let alone young web-users with time.

Yours kindly,

Shakir Razak

I hear you. I realize that it’s not enough to simply be SE friendly and that people have to link to you, but I believe that pages like this will ultimately be linked to in greater numbers than Wikipedia. The difference is that Wikipedia is narrative and Mahalo is largely bullet points; furthermore, the Wikipedia entries don’t always follow a set form, while Mahalo’s do. People like bullet points and Mahalo guarantees that the bullets are relevant and do exactly what they say they do.

I believe that destination pages like this will ultimately take over the web as more and more companies learn how to game search results. The web is moving from information to navigate to information given; it’s choices moving to answers, and we’ll eventually figure out how to push the junk to the side.

Mahalo and sites like it will become the new experts because they have people behind them. It’s not wisdom of the crowds and UGC –> it’s making the right filters and figuring out how to get the nuggets on the site in a massive way.

Really? I’m pretty sure newspapers have been doing that for ages. Search term: today’s news. Search result: newspaper. Why shouldn’t editors/curators be paid for their work if they want to?

Then … why aren’t more Squidoo results top? It was the same basic premise as Mahalo.

I’ll tell you why: you have to get other sites to link to you, it’s not just about having a page that is SE friendly. A major reason why so many Wikipedia results top the SE results is because of the amount of linkage from other sites.

Maybe I’ll be wrong, but I don’t see sites en masse linking to aggregation pages that links to sources. Sure, there will be some cases where linking to a good, well updated (and I’m not sure how good they can possibly be for updating) page. It’s like linking to digg that links to the source. A collection of links is one thing, but by itself it’s not very valuable. They need to provide some editiorial beyond the links themselves and become link-friendly content other than just links.

Instead, Mahalo is more like a search result page itself which Google has said repeatedly that they frown on linking prominently to lists of search engine result pages. They block their own search results pages. This could be the achille’s heel for Mahalo at the end of the day.

- that is if I get acepted (not likely)

And it’s also free SEO - get paid to make pages for your clients; from the client and from Mahalo. This is an SEO dream.

How long before the above two influences combine to make crappy results?

Wait until the stories start that xyz mahalo guide was paid off to put abc link in place 1. Oh those stories will be all over valleywag.

The other thing you all have to realize: The Mahalo results pages are incredibly SEO friendly, and will ultimately start to be the top search results for a given term on Google.

Dan

Cha-cha offers human guides to help search results, dmoz offers human editors for years and yet Jason thinks Mahalo is somehow revolutionary? Dumb. This will go over like Seth Godin’s Squidoo. No thanks.

I have watched over the past year as TechCrunch has turned from a news source into a publicity platform for Michael Arrington’s friends and investments. We all know that Jason Calacanis is partnering with you guys for the TechCrunch conference, but do you really have to give him a traffic bump for every tiny feature he releases?

I used to cringe when people would accuse you guys of a conflict of interests in the comments section of a post. Like when Michael would plug EdgeIO in posts completely unrelated to classifieds. But now I’m starting to realize that it’s not all bs, that there is some glad handing going on behind the scenes, whether you all will admit it or not.

Also, it’s clear to all of us that you guys are abandoning the sort of coverage that first helped you to become popular—startup coverage—and starting to cover more general industry news. And that’s fine—it’ll help you to draw a bigger audience and increase your revenue. But as one of the early adopters, it’s sad to see one of the old standby’s drop it’s bread and butter just to pad the bottom line.

Maybe I’m just bummed that I’m having to switch to other sources to find startup and emerging technology news.

Additionally, as Allen has pointed out, the issue of bias is going to come to a head. As I’ve noted before, search engine credibility comes in part from the perception of objectivity.