Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.

Come now Duncan, Mahalo and Techmeme as Google killers? Robert is really putting up a reality distortion field to rival Mr. Jobs if he thinks that one jives with the way the world works. You could -almost- reasonably argue that Facebook could put together an great search engine based around its social graph but even that is a stretch.

Techmeme is a techie’s toy, a fantastic one that I couldn’t really get through my news day without but nonetheless a toy. Mahalo is a noble experiment that might make some waves, but will ultimately need to rely on its niche of evangelists to keep revenue flowing. Never of these products can garner the type of mainstream appeal that Google has. At least not in their current forms.

To beat Google, you have to have something that is as useful to “MySpacers” as it is to the entrenched tech crowd. Neither of these three products, even Facebook, has quite enough universal appeal. Nor do they appear to be able to get that in the foreseeable future.

It’s hard to believe Google is such a giant. Honestly their search engine is practically useless and they only search 4/5 of the web??

Human search is the future, but no one has figured out how to do it.

Google would have tanked long ago without ads and nothing else they copied or started is either good or the market leader.

They have to buy brands (YT) and then figure out a way to make money from them.

I don’t think they’ll ever die, but the future of search has to be personal people based interaction.

That doesn’t seem quite right. Mahalo isn’t looking to replace Google, they’re looking to piggy back on Google, IMO. Rather than optimizing for the long tail they’re positioning themselves to be the top result when searching for common terms. I mean, how often does Wikipedia come up when you search for something? If it’s a noun, especially a proper noun, it’s usually above the fold.

If Mahalo can create super high-quality content about, say, home rental and purchasing, then everyone searching in that ballpark will be directed to Mahalo. Bingo, bango, tons of impressions.

Maybe I’m totally wrong, but I just don’t see their “technology” as being scalable to Google-like levels, especially since Google is all about the long tail.

Steve
I didn’t say I agreed with the proposition
For those interested (at least at the time of writing) the Kyte.tv embed also has chat. Nifty feature where you can discuss Scoble’s video.

@Max:

“Honestly their search engine is practically useless …”

You are almost certainly a crazy person.

I know Duncan, I just got bombarded with this on twitter and my feed reader at the same time. It makes very nice weekend link bait, but all it really accomplishes is stirring up the old — “Google is dying” meme.

Google’s search is entrenched and “good enough” for most people. A Google killer will need to be able to monetize itself as well as Adwords has for Google, distribute itself as well as Adsense and provide hand over first better search results (or something that breaks the paradigm so completely that traditional search is seen as old hat).

Why would you even bother putting this article up?
There really must be more important news happening in the tech world.

I am sick of morons like this wanting their 15 minutes, i just wasted 2 min of my life that i can never get back.

Thank you

Predictions! Somebody please gift scoble a copy of the black swan

Mahalo uses Google results. It’s all same. It’s PHP grabbing page.

ASP.NET to write search engine

Hey, duncan…

Careful…. Don’t waste TC reader’s time. They get piss off.

They are working web 2.0 thing.. They don’t like to argue….

Or… Google buys Facebook… Google clones Mahalo with 2 weeks of work and adds it as a supplement to Google Search… Google buys Wikipedia for good measure aaaannnnnnnndddd…. no one gives a damn what techmeme is because Google News 7.0 is out by then.

Advice
I’m not 100% sure where you are coming from. I’m not sure if this wastes people’s time. Sure, it’s not ground breakingly amazing but the subject matter is interesting, after all if I could answer the question (what is the future of search) I wouldn’t be writing for TechCrunch, I’d be the head of a multi-billion dollar startup

The chat since I put this post up (via the Kyte embed) has made it worth while by itself

Are Scoble and Jason thick friends?

Scoble’s post does not make a strong case for Facebook or Mahalo coming even close to Google.
Everyone seems to be missing the fact that Facebook is still the number 2 social networking site in US. It does not have a strong user base in South America and Asia like Google does. Any analysis which does not take into account the global nature of the internet industry is bound to have a large error margin.

Mahalo’s strategy seems the exact antithesis of what Google did against Yahoo. For some time, Yahoo did stand by their original strategy of having a ‘direrctory ‘ for finding relevant sites on the net. As the number of websites grew exponentially a human powered directory strategy failed. It simply can’t scale. The growth is even faster now with countries in Europe and Asia, having joined the internet bandwagon. Having a human powered search engine like Mahalo’s can simply not cope up with the amount of available information across all geographies, not to mention the number of languages used across these geographically distributed websites.

completely agree about social or people being google’s weekness. the future is social search, but barriers to entry is high and google has the inferstructure. they have the best chance of delivering. especially with people like david baily from amazon in their camp (product lead for universal).

Scoble has officially jumped the shark.

to #9 (I am not kidding you, regardless of my stupid URL): Mahalo uses Google results where they have not written a human edited page. Mahalo hasn’t been around that long (what, 4 months?) and doesn’t have that many pages yet. The pages they have created are substantially different than the Google results. Still, I found this (as twitted by Scoble himself) amusing: Google works fast:

http://onotech.blogspot.com/20.....coble.html

I think it must be an astronomical small % of the people who saw the videos would have ever queried: google, mahalo, facebook, techmeme, scoble ? Regardless, the speed of Google is most impressive, and I doubt with an army of Mahalo guides you’ll ever see that kind of update speed. Then again, Mahalo isn’t being designed for people who’d do such queries.

I don’t buy it. Google is like God, I mean, Cmon…do you really see any signs of slowing down?

this is one of the silliest things i’ve read on tc. i don’t mind you posting this duncan. it’s worth knowing that people have ideas this silly. or at least agendas this silly. and i don’t think max is trolling. he’s taking a postmodern approach to this blurb. and i appreciate his sense of humor.

I’m not sure that I had a go at Max, indeed I smiled at his comment buster (19).

As I’ve said in other comments I didn’t say I agree (I don’t), but I think the broader question is valid (what is the future of search). The discussion, in part in the comments here, and even more so in the chat with Scoble via the Kyte box has been interesting and worth having.

Mike (16): I’m thinking slot machine style futurism

Who cares…. I can’t wait to see GI JOE the movie 2010. I hope they make it better than starwars & lord of rings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN034sBeF4c

Social search sites (like http://www.tallstreet.com/ ) offer a way to more fairly rank search results. It means sites arn’t ranked solely on popularity, which is all google does.

There is definately an advantage to their method.

I dunno…
Alt+D, type “goo”, hit down arrow, hit enter
That’s just instinct to me, hardwired into my system. Google’s good enough.

I mean, I’ve never even heard of Mahalo or techmeme, and never visited Facebook (been to MySpace once though). Google’s a verb I use all the time - I go Google it. It’s hard to beat that popularity.

“As the number of websites grew exponentially a human powered directory strategy failed. It simply can’t scale.” - Manoj
What about dmoz.org then?

Cheers,
Hobo.

Like in the good old days of Usenet, here’s the crosspost of my comment on Scobleizer :

Read Mahalo’s FAQ carefully, especially #2 “What sites will I find / not find on Mahalo?”. Question : do you really accept that someone is deciding what’s good and what’s not for you ??? What you should read and what you should not ? Which info you could get and what you can’t ??? Hey Guys, time to wake up : don’t you think this kind of universe looks familiar ? What a “Brave New World”…

_Marc

“Google will be beaten by …….”. Quote by “…..”. Good way to get your name in the blogs on a slow news day.

And BTW, how is Mahalo different then Wikipedia, other then the fact that they need to pay people to create their content? I’ve never been able to figure that out.

Why not just build a smarter search on top of the Wikipedia content? Or pay people to link search terms to content in Wikipedia, instead of writing new content/links? I can almost picture the dinner conversation that inspired Mahalo. Its not going to work.

I’m all for taking on Google, not because I don’t like Google but because I think everyone always needs to get in the ring with the Champ, but the more and more I read that sites like Mahalo are the best thing all of us can think of to take down King Google the more I believe that they are going to be wearing the Champ Belt for a long, long time.

Robert Scoble needs to crawl out from under his rock. Outside of the valley no one cares about Guy K, Mahalo, techmeme etc… and as far as facebook, myspace is still way larger. and for all the talk of api and widgets, the number of third party widgets on myspace dwarfs facebook by 9 to 1.

what I think a lot of people are missing here is Scoble has a lot at stake here. if this social graph becomes the foundation for search, he is at the top of the “influencer trust” food chain. Podtech is clearly on its way into the deadpool so he’s going to need a new gig soon.

he clearly doesn’t like seo, but the social graph can be gamed just like any other system. in fact it is gamed all the time on myspace and its starting on facebook too.

We believe that the future of search should be in helping people to easily find information on the Web and not just return thousands of pages.

Google are innovating all the time, most of the time you probably won’t notice and I’m sure if they don’t have something in the works just now, they’ll acquire it.

I agree too. I actually have the tagline for it. “_You_, and experts in offline subjects like yourself are smarter then one million dumb processing units.” There is def. a need, I and I think people are smart to see the need but no one has got it right yet. RollYo.com was close and I thought they would get a lot of traction when they first launched, but they missed it too. The open API in to Yahoo (and other) search evens the technical playing ground and (rightly) forces the next major search engine to come up with a really, really, really good idea. Not just a good one.

Mike, any chance if giving Duncan his own feed? Unless you really ran out of things to write about…

OK…after learning about Scoble’s video I’ve now resolved to kill Google, in four years, and am sketching out my four year plan. Here’s what I have so far:

2008: Kill Google Ride Finder
2009: Kill Google Mars
2010: ???
2011: Google: RIP

Any help with the plan would be much appreciated, thanks!

Scoble proves himself an idiot again. We’ll have a post on this over at TechDumpster.

This is pure link baiting and Duncan Riley falls for it as usual. Yawn. TechCrunch gets worse by the day.

The issue with google is that they seem to be ruled by the geek attitude.

They only build impressive tools without heart for the mass….

TechDumpster (comment 33)
why in the world would you think that I would think that this is anything other than link baiting, Scoble is the master and he’d probably admit it if you asked him. If you read my other comments though you’ll see that I still think that the overall question is worthy of discussion. The chat (of which I’ve only just now, as I type this disconnected from) was one of the better chats I’ve had online recently, good crowd, interesting discussion.

How can you beat Google? They might lose in search but they make money on ads. The only reason the search engine exists at this points is because it generates pageviews. Google buys eyeballs through its content sites so that it has “legit” traffic it can offer advertisers. Will any advertiser contest hits it gets from a google site?

Secondly, what the fuck is that beeping noise? It seems to happen whenever someone chats. What an annoying widget.

The truth is, I barely use Google anymore for comprehensive searches.
I use the del.icio.us search, it never let’s me down.. I really like Tag based searches, and # of people who saved that page as a favorite.. I really do think it is the future.. nothing can beat that…

The only weakness of del.icio.us is the speed of showing search results, sometimes I wait 30 - 40 seconds for the results to show up, but, it’s worth it..

P.S. I have tried many tag search engines such as:
http://www.keotag.com/
http://www.simpy.com/
and some more..
Nothing comes close to the ease of use and efficient results as of del.icio.us

P.S #2 If you thought del.icio.us was just a bookmarking tool, I thought so too for the first couple of weeks - until I actually noticed the “search” field on the top right hand corner..

~ Ilan

Google for such cant lose sleep over this sites cos they can always come up with one of their own like they have always done by buying up other sites that have they potential to position them in social search. very well sites like http://www.mediarati.com will be potential target.

There are so many holes in this I don’t know where to start.

To embed Part II of Scoble’s channel simply add /47146 to the src url in the embedding code (makes …MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118/47146 ). This will show the video you want, also after Robert ads more shows.

Cheers.

Unfortunately, this is all the preserve of geeks. The masses simply don’t know what search results they want and couldn’t care less. I speak to people the whole time who say ‘oh, I didn’t know Google had adverts on it’!?!? Masses of people use MSN Live search, even though the results are often less than useless. They use it because it is the default on their system and they don’t know any better and simply don’t care. SEO only upsets the geeks. The masses will bumble their way through booking a hotel in New York via some crap SEO’d (or even paid) result in a search engine because it’s the first thing they come across without thinking.

It is upsetting, yes, but I fear it is the reality.

well — maybe facebook and myspace have way better content than orkut, mahalo — never heard of it

but dude u gotta understand google is an elephant , its rich in cash and rich in r&d , if it has nothing in the works , it will just buy lef-right and center …. also did u hear the results of google last week — they doubled their profits — thatz double their warchest ………… also — google is coming out with something really special that will rock the boats of all the top biggies — by this year end ..

Google caters to the masses. I bet there are millions who only know Google synonymous with search. Ask them scalability, algorithm, SEO, ranking, deep linking, social search and all that mambo jumbo and see what they come up with. They will enter these words right into Google search to find out what it is.

I wonder if Google is asleep. Especially after reading this Scoble video. This is laughable indeed.

I admire someone who will make a prediction, even if it’s most likely not going to happen. IMO Google won’t be unseated anytime soon but social search is going to be part of the mix. It doesn’t seem likely though that Maholo will be leading the charge based on what I can see of their company.

Duncan i believe you started some great dialogue. I never read all the comments as in depth as I have in this post.

Look as for now i think Google will not be passed over. Saying that in 5 years time if we are still searching the same way as we do using Google I will be very surprised and disappointed. As we all know google is far from perfect and I am sure they know that too.

I lump this with paul grahams microsoft prediction. good luck.

I’m sorry, but I have to ask: does Scoble even understand how each of these systems work? Has he looked at what Google has built, infrastructure wise — and I dont mean just hardware infrastructure, but also mapreduce, google file system, etc. Has he read the paper on the Google architecture — mahalo for “anatomy large scale hypertext search engine”, I mean google for it.

And then even if there is a technically superior solution, there is really no guarantee they would be able to capture market share. Two different things entirely.

@Duncan: I realize you understand that Scoble is link baiting, but even if you thought the topic worthy of discussion, why point to Scoble’s article as the starting point — surely there are better articles on the future of search?

What’s really funny is all of these people bitching about TC wasting their time, yet they waste enough time to post about it wasting their time.

A little moronic, don’t ya think?

This is the oldest trick in the book, Muhammad Ali did it , Wrestlers do it.

You say something outraegous to draw attention , and for Scoble attention = traffic = $$$$

Way to play right into his hands.

is it me or KYTE is the most annoying player on the planet?

Damn! Even when I’m writing this I hear it “Pinging” …I have to switch off audio to quietly browse comments.

D@#$@$!!!

I really hate applications that emit sounds even when they are stopped.

Scoble is Dan Ackroyd?

Just Calacanis link bait. NFW Mahalo is a Google killer.

Facebook has a decent shot though.

is it just me, or is Mahalo just About.com? yeah, that was sustainable.

I am the next Google. Wait until my social search networking engine is released later this year. Web 3.0 is coming folks.

that embedded kyte thing on this is very annoying - it pings every time someone makes a comment which seems like every other second. I had to turn the volume down then it turned down everything

Scoble is just muckracking to drive his own user numbers. Maybe his company is teeing up to sell? Anyway, no point in reading him anymore as this is complete BS. As another commenter pointed out, this marks his jump the shark moment.

Robert Dewey did I hurt your feelings when I said that this post was a waste of time. Im sorry I have a box of Kleenex here so you can dry your tears.

I like TC alot but not everything is worthy of being posted, know as for the moronic don’t ya think part, I believe it’s moronic to post comment on a post that has nothing to do with the post, I have an idea why don’t you go get the dummies guide to the internet and start learning how to build basic sites so you can actually understand what we are discussing in here.

Take care Dewey

To see the future of Maholo, just check out About.com, the original human-powered search portal. Today, they’re a niche player at best. And #19 is right, yahoo started out with a human-powered directory, but it didn’t scale and switched to algoritmic search.

Mahalo would not exist without Google. Google will go on perfectly well without Mahalo.

who give a f&*k about mahalo.

The amount of batshit-fucking-loco in this comment thread amuses me.

is this kyte thing making that annoying noise? boo.

Am I missing something here? It seems to me that part of Google’s secret sauce compared with its predecessors was exactly their vigorous use of human input.

The difference with Mahalo is that they aren’t asking for explicit human input. Instead, they take the links we make and use it to feed PageRank. They take our incorrect queries and turn them into spelling correction. They take the data from what we click on — both ads and search results — and use that to tune results.

If it turns out that manually constructed results are anything great, Google should be able to incorporate that pretty easily. But my guess is they’ve already extracted most of that value already.

@Kyte - What would ever give you the idea that competing with your content by emitting beeps was a good idea? So wait, what was the video about?

if you believe in some massive united social network of people (that would take time to rate, bookmark… the pages they visit, and would also rate all those BS pages (like a “our history” page on a website of some caffe bar in some village in some small X country)…

then what prevents a even vorse form of “SEO” with millions of payed zombie or just slightly payed half/zombie users making accounts and shifting the rankings?

google looks at the page which is the primary object here , if you try to make a very very good fake page about for example “insurance” it actually becomes a page about insurance…

Scoble knows that occasionally making absolutely outlandish statements that get people whipped into a frenzy is a great way to keep readers reminded of your presence, your business and your blog. Its a personal marketing thing more than it is about real belief on his part that Google is going to be taken under by these companies. Just my opinion. Lots of bloggers do it from time to time.

AMEN to the Mahalo = About.com comments, I don’t get why people think this is a brand new concept that is going to kick google’s butt.

google says %70 of search terms have never been searched before. that is why mahalo way would never work.

Facebook won’t kill Google, but they’ll have their search market share should they focus on that field, or maybe they will partner with Yahoo or Microsoft to provide search results? That would worry Google.

Juan C. Sosa
http://www.intelways.com
the one-stop search tool

1. The community is not infinite. Mahalo has no traction. GigaOm, a tech blog gets more traffic than Mahalo which is supposed to be a “search engine”. Search engines are supposed to be the highest traffic draws. Mahalo’s results in certain areas are decent, but most of the “cute information” is something that Google could pull just by scanning the Wikipedia entry for that title. Traffic to Mahalo is stagnating - it’s not quite the hockey stick for such a supposedly “social” site.

2. Social news and bookmarking sites do not have broad appeal. Digg has been out for quite a while. It has stagnated and traffic is not growing. After a few people with too much time on their hands dominate a network, others lose interest.

3. Passive technology is more rapidly adopted than technology that requires thinking and interaction. The inherent scalability issue with sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon is that there are only a limited number of people who really care about a topic and even fewer care to influence the search results for that topic. This is why Digg sucks - it’s dominated by a bunch of idiots. Do we really want our search results being influenced by pimply 25-year old geeks who still live in their mother’s basement?

4. SEOs will infiltrate this to an even higher degree than current search engines. Social networks are already overrun by spam. A tremendous percentage of pages on Myspace are spam. Many Facebook apps are spamming. Most social networks spam to grow big (ahem, Flixter). Web 2.0 is all about spam. Robert Scoble is spam.

5. Yahoo does not have “mojo”. Yes, it is true that Yahoo owns delicious and Flickr. So what? Flickr is mostly used by people in the San Francisco area - most of us don’t want our photos to be openly available to everyone. Then again, most of us aren’t desperate for attention. He argues that Google and Microsoft are screwed but Yahoo might be okay. Give me a break. Yahoo may be doing some interesting things, but delicious and Flickr aren’t part of the discussion there. The very fact that even extremely popular sites owned by Yahoo don’t have over 3000 bookmarks on delicious shows how worthless it is (and let’s not forget that it’s slow).

Scoble: 0

TechDumpster: One Googol

“In a few years, Windows will just be a set of poorly debugged set of device drivers.” Marc Andreesen called. He wants 1995 back.

Actually, you can embed to a specific kyte.tv show. Just do this:

1. Figure out the Show ID (it’s placed at the end of the kyte.tv URL if you select a specific show).
2. Search the embed code for the channel information. For example: “channels/6118″
3. Place the show after the channel ID like this: channels/6118/47146
4. Use the changed embed code

The next release of kyte will have a less obscure way of doing this.

The future of search is a Swarm Competition approach where some big benefactor (Yahoo!) links together the 1000 or so AltSearch entities to create the Father of All Social Graphs and do better searching:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.co.....es-part-3/

Cheers!

BW

Jason Calacanis & Robert Scoble both are annoying.

Mahalo is struggling. Calacanis & Scoble are just doing self promotions.

google should just add wikipedia results to its search results, like it added news results and video results when they made universal search.

After reading this post I was just thinking that I don’t use search as much as I used to. I’ve pretty much already picked the sites that I will frequently visit. Sometimes I will get suggestions from people.

The only times I use search is when I have a phone number for example and looking for the company’s website or looking to see who sells or reviews a specific product. But I hardly use search to browse the internet anymore.

Scoble doesn’t think very clearly.

Does he know that over 25% of google queries are UNIQUE in any given period?

Is a human powered search network going to build adequate landing pages for a billion unique queries a year? and update them all? Or is it going to decide what we “REALLY” meant when we typed “dll msconfig error 234″?

Any human powered search engine is going to collapse under its own weight as it grows, and look increasingly useless compared to WikiP, which realizes what niche human powered result pages should occupy in the netverse.

bah.

Scoble should stick to pimping facebook widgets.

It’s comical how TechCrunch has stopped trackbacks from TechDumpster. Sounds like someone’s a bit afraid of our more intelligent commentary.

Mahalo = Yellowpages!

Scoble’s post is a nice example of link baiting. To bad there isn’t a section on SEO on TC?

According to Alexa, Mahalo may be getting 35% of its traffic internally:

30% from greenhouse.mahalo.com - used by part time guides to add Mahalo search results via the Greenhouse program

5% guides.mahalo.com - most likely used by Mahalo employees

I realize Alexa is not the greatest source but this is interesting nonetheless.

Actually, search can only improve if the millions and millions of dead websites and web pages are trashed. Relevant information is what’s needed in search. I grow weary of having to go thru hundreds of dead links and useless information. All search companies need to clean house.

Whilst I think that social search will be a beautiful thing (the wisdom of the crowds and all that) can humans indexing really cope with the volume and diversity of searches which will be required.?

Scoble, alas, understands far too little how, why and what people search for. His line of reasoning is ludicrous, and has been effectively (and stingingly) taken down by someone who knows what he’s talking about, Danny Sullivan: http://searchengineland.com/070827-121805.php

“Scoble is spam.” — Agreed. From now on, I will choose to ignore such “attention-grabbing” but intellectually and rhetorically vacuous (not to mention buzzword-filled) attempts at punditry. This is idiocy, and written by someone who simply does not understand (and has not investigated) how the unwashed masses outside the valley search, and *what* they search for.

The problem is that the growth of the web is much, much too fast for Mahalo or Facebook or any other human-centric solution. Back in 1994 when NCSA had a “What’s New on the Web” page that really did display everything that was new on the web that day, Mahalo might have had a good shot at becoming a human-based search engine, but let’s be honest here. This is exactly what Yahoo did. They started out as a human-reviewed directory of listings, and the growth of the web overwhelmed them to the point where they basically had to switch to a search engine.

I’m not sure what Robert is thinking here– if he’s decrying Google’s indexing of video, that’s a relatively easily solved problem, especially for them. If he’s taking them to task for showing _relevant_ and timely results, I don’t see how that’s any different than what got them to be number one in the first place. There was a huge paradigm switch from Yahoo or Altavista over to Google, almost overnight, because of their relevance and timeliness.

Scoble touting Facebook and a Calicanis operation? Wow. That’s really out of the ordinary.

I think its an intriguing idea, albeit economically impractical, that another company’s search fabric will so dutifully usurp the leviathan that is Google in four years. I recently watched a documentary called “Who killed the electric car?” which chronicles how the electronic car was removed from the marketplace by a number of factors (pointing heavily toward corporate greed). It was, essentially, a fabric of decisions that influenced the demise of the vehicle. More importantly, the film recognizes that human behaviors surrounding automobiles and fuel consumption kept the car from gaining the foothold in the market that it deserved. Like the electric car, noise-free, socially graphed…never mind “pure” …search results must overcome the momentum of Google Advertising mechanism AND it must overcome the homogenized behavior of users who are comfortable with search-as-we-know-it. How many “advanced searchers” did he say there were? “Not many.” I’d prefer it if he were right, but I’m skeptical.

The social networking websites are practically an Internet on top of the Internet, or augmented Internet. When they grow, get too massive and pieces falling apart, they would need advanced search engine to work. And to differentiate and make money, cooperation with other web resources will start (in fact stared) to surface. Its useless for Facebook to develop a search engine, because third parties are needed to effectively line up the resources.

The point? When mature, Google will buy out or join with the winner(s). So its nonsense to say ‘beaten’ in busienss world. We have seen so many unthinkable partners.

bf

Oh please. No one’s going to Facebook, et. al to do their searching. They’re going there to waste time. (I say this with unfortunate experience.) Google does have to evolve and become more stupid-user-friendly, but as it stands, no one is serving up as reliable and relevant or as wide a selection of results.

I don’t know about where y’all live, but people are still saying “just Google it” around me, and I don’t see that changing in a few years time without some catastrophic (or amazingly inventive/creative) events occurring. They haven’t yet, and I don’t imagine they will. If they do, Google can just buy them. Duh.

I watched all three vids. I don’t think he makes a case. He also thinks Yahoo is going to whip some magic up out of all their Web 2.0 aquisitions. I like the idea of social search and think it could be a force… But Mahalo is not that force. Mahalo is a piece of crap and Scoble thinks that if you hook up enough horses, you can make that wagon fly. Not in this world.

hmmmm…neither scoble nor calcanis are thick. just full of shit (literally)

Mahalo sucks, they have to manually make a search results page for anything u want to search for, eg: try looking up “black sabbath” alone and you’ll get some results, try “black sabbath new album” and they’ll give u google results!