Video Of Mahalo v. Wikia Search At DLD; Google’s Marissa Mayer Weighs In
Michael Arrington
29 comments »
The organizers of the DLD conference in Munich put on a great show today. One of the more lively sessions was called “Humans Disrupting Algorithms” and featured Wikipedia/Wikia Search’s Jimmy Wales and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, moderated by Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick.
Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results. Jimmy was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.
Perhaps the most interesting moment, however, was when Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience.
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who didn’t attend, has a good basic transcript of the session (proving to me once again that it is often easier to cover a conference remotely instead of batting crowds and dealing with terrible Internet coverage). I was able to take some video of a couple of interesting segments, though, embedded below.
In the first segment Wales gives the audience his overview of Wikia Search, and Calacanis jumps in with a few observations as well. The second is Marissa’s comment on what she sees as a false dichotomy - Google Page Rank, she notes, is based on real humans linking to sites on the web. Listening to her felt like a cold shower after a night of heavy partying.
As an aside, the DLD conference is clearly one of the better events I’ve attended in the last few months.
Pwned
Boy, Goog sure is everywhere trying to tamp down the competitors…Mayer, Matt Cutts - they get out in the “community” a lot - interesting PR stance.
Laughable that those two sites are mentioned in the same breath as Google.
Hail to the GOOG, baby.
Competition in the search arena is clearly important, but I’m really at a loss to see how Mahalo does anything apart from add steps to the process of searching. Even if most people were as frustrated with Google’s results as Jason implies (which clearly they aren’t), surely the answer is a better algorithm, not a human-centric process.
I find the topic of “human-powered search” one of the most irrelevant and full of misconception.
Let’s start by saying that since late 90s, all search engines are human powered! Humans create webpages that search engine crawl and index. Humans create hyperlinks that search engines use to determine authority (even if it’s a bot, it’s bot programmed by a human to accelerate the speed in which things can be done), and Humans using toolbar on their browsers are sending information back to search engine to help SEs understand relevance of those links.
So, what Mahalo and Wikia are trying to do is to make the part of Search Engine that is easiest to be automated, manual. It doesn’t get dumber than that.
It was clearly a remarkable session. Two prominent challengers on the panel. The champion in the audience asking questions. Jeff Jarvis asking too. You participating in the discussing. All social networking entzrepreneurs listening. That was really a remarkable session, concerning the people attending. That was really awsome! I’m glad I was part of it.
The irony is Mahalo is just one blatant SEO gambit. Jason saw how sites like Digg and Wikipedia always seem to come up near the top of Google results. Naturally he thought why not try to create a similar middleground site that does the same thing and then try to make money off the ads (ironically Google’s.) The thing is, Digg and Wikipedia get their rankings organically (at least in the Google controlled world where links mean a ton) whereas Mahalo is having to be much more obvious in their SEO intent. Just take a look at their site structure and the fact that they’re blatantly targeting the most popular search queries as their site’s “content.” It’s not about helping the user. I can already find that content via the main search engines and the last thing I want is another middleground site trying to clog up the rankings.
My hat’s off to him for recognizing the obvious (although I don’t think they’re going to have much success.) But it still doesn’t make all his bluster about SEO any less hypocritical.
Perhaps this is extraneous, but I noticed that the people second-guessing Jason and Jimmy have startups that no one has ever heard of. I have to say, as a typical-yet-slightly-tech-savvy user of the intertubes, I’m much more likely to use Mahalo or Wikia than Lypp or Sampa. Apples and oranges, I know, but it would be a lot easier to take those opinions seriously if they were voiced by serious players and not grumpy also-rans.
bash google, then take their traffic as 76% of inbound traffic. love it.
at least Jason admitted he is a seo play:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ment-59654
#8 - some dude - why have you heard more of mahalo or wikia search more than the other new ones? not everyone has a webulebrity running the company
No man on Earth could wake up next to beautiful Marisa and expect for one solitary minute that he could ever get a word in edgewise.
I had no idea she was such a long winded bore!
The real question is how they got their “webulebrity.” Wales founded Wikipedia, Calacanis did Weblogs, Inc.: both are clearly capable businessmen with a proven track record and probably bank accounts to match. I don’t believe that good ideas only come from successful people, but I do think it’s funny when people who would trade places with those guys in a New York minute second-guess their business models. Not sure if you saw compete.com’s recent breakdown of Mahalo’s numbers, but I don’t think they’re strictly attributable to “webulebrity.” Seems like sour grapes is all I’m saying.
Will Wikia and Mahalo hit gold in the long run? Hard to tell, but bashing them now is certainly en vogue. Even if bashers are right in the long run, I suspect they’d love to have a *ahem* failure like Mahalo or Wikia on their resume.
I don’t know about compete’s numbers, but not really my thing. If mahalo makes it, I’ll be surprised. Most entrepreneurs are just lucky. I wish them and all startups good luck, it’s a tuogh biz, and easier to guess failure considering the rate (90%)
How about a site that takes bad audio from conferences and digitally clarifies it so you can understand what the hell the people are talking about?
#8 You’re obviously the one with the agenda to push here given that you must have clicked from my name here to my blog to my LinkedIn profile just to come up with the cheap shot that I’m somehow out to get Mahalo. I’m sure that Jason C is more than big enough to take rational criticism in stride.
@14 Heheh
Daniel -
Actually, I always look into the background of naysayers, particularly when they voluntarily provide links to their blogs and LinkedIn profiles.
I have no agenda, as their success or failure puts no money in my pocket. I’ve watched Mahalo for a few months though, and as much as their momentum perplexes me, the amount of ill will and negative feelings Calacanis generates is the truly astounding part. I’m not convinced that human-powered search isn’t just a hyped-up business model, but I can only come to one conclusion when I see that it’s working for the nonce, yet people insist on predicting it’s failure.
If you felt slighted by my comment, rest assured that it wasn’t as much about you as it about people in the internet business allowing their emotions to obscure the obvious facts. If people are using it and you still fail to see the need for it, then respectfully, I think your vision is limited. Useful to you? Probably not. But Mahalo users don’t need to weigh in: their sheer numbers do it for them.
I’m not interested in a flame war or even taking cheapshots, and I’ll even retract my “sour grapes” comment. Still, I suspect that as you say, Calacanis can take your comments in stride… all the way to the bank.
#7 hit the nail on the head.
Mahalo adds on unnecessary step to finding information from Google, much like automated search engine result scrapers do.
If Google would do the right thing, they should consider banning Mahalo from their results, just like they do other spammers.
WTF is that chick in the 2nd video saying lol.
The audio quality is so bad that I can only make out every 20th word lol, it is like listening to another language.
@17: OK, but my main point isn’t that Mahalo won’t be successful in attracting users. But just because that’s true it doesn’t mean they’re building a better way of searching the web than Google, or that Jason’s claims that Google is a haven for spammers and unethical SEO tactics are valid.
Mahalo’s much closer to a directory or portal than a search engine, but Jason is being a smart businessman and using some “judo marketing” tactics to assume the position of David to Google’s Goliath.
I’m not interested in a flame war, either, but I do take issue with your implication that anyone who is critical of the value Mahalo offers to search has “limited vision” or is no different from those blindly saying “Mahalo sucks, lol.”
At #8… If you had spent the time to do one extra click and see the “About Me” on my blog you’d have seen my resume, which includes 4.5 years working on a Search Engine. That’s what gives me authority to talk about the subject, not my startup which has absolutely nothing to do with Search Engines and I won’t be benefit either way, if Mahalo is successful or not.
I think Google’s in a MUCH better position than Mahalo to implement a human touch to search in a more pragmatic and useful fashion. They already have MASSIVE amounts of data on what users respond to in their existing results. We’re also seeing the first evolutionary steps with their personal search. More recently has been the experimental ability to vote on listings within the results (which currently only effects personal search, but that obviously has the potential to eventually be extended on a broader level.) Most recently, Yahoo began introducing Del.ico.us content in their search results (which is arguably some of the best content out there IMO.)
Both of these engines have far larger pools of data to work with to get a more realistic feel about what exactly people are looking for and how much to let them control what shows up. Mahalo’s little more than just another web directory - it’s just so much more blatant in its SEO intent coming in this late in the game. You can’t really fault it for that. Google’s created the ecosystem all sites are trying to play in currently (the whole ’social’ web wouldn’t be a glimmer of its current self without Google’s link-dependent nature giving these sites a new audience.) But like I said above, I have no doubts they’re trying to use personalization and a gradual combination of user feedback (in some form or fashion) to push us toward the next evolutionary step of a more hybrid style search engine.
I can’t understand a thing she’s saying. why is the audio so bad?
Fair enough.
Even so, I think it’s important to realize that it must have value if it’s attracting an audience. I should confess that I was an early critic, but I’m now officially reserving judgment until I can understand why people are using it. I think that anyone with a sound mind for business should be able to see past their own needs and consider the needs of their users/customers; people in the web business obviously have no need for it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a useful object lesson to be learned. I think you cheat yourself if you blame it all on Calacanis’s bluster and notoriety. I didn’t suggest that you’re a mindless wag, but I do think you’re rationalizing and experiencing a case of unwillingness to see value. My point all along has been that tech-savvy folk like us are not the target audience. The target audience doesn’t know what SEO is… hell, they don’t know what TechCrunch is.
Your critique is that they don’t add value to search. My contention is that they don’t add value to YOUR searches. If that idea doesn’t ring true to you, it’s entirely your prerogative. Still, I agree with your notion of judo marketing, but I sincerely doubt that Mahalo won’t parlay that into new products. I’m all but convinced that even intelligent naysayers like you will find themselves utterly perplexed when Mahalo judo-flips their expectations.
I firmly believe that Human-powered search is superior and I am working on a search engine to prove it.
Why do you need 3,564,578 search results? In the words of one of my business partners “you need only ten good results”.
RAUL
http://www.tengee.com
Anyone interested in cross between wikipedia and youtube using interactive streaming video for news, dictionary, entertainment? email me
atlantaventures@yahoo.com
http://www.realviewtv.com
No body cares, when Google was new no body cared…. we all have a life and no one gives a penny for what human or non-human search would do.
Google was not a conspiracy nor wikipedia..It Evolved by itself..you cannot push something into a man’s throat..if it is better…the universe itself will adjust.
This comparison is irrelavent
Thanks for your insights on DLD, Michael. Unbound Edition’s Teri Schindler was there with you, and she has posted her takeaway series over on UE. Hope you enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed yours.
http://www.unboundedition.com/.....w/4389/54/