Comments on: Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results

By: rednikki

rednikki — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:07:23 +0000

I just wanted to let Lucky Lester know that he's absolutely right - we did need a Poker search result. You'll find it here: http://www.mahalo.com/Poker Thanks for pointing it out! If you want to find out what we're working on right now, you can go to the Daily SeRP List and see our results being built live. http://www.mahalo.com/The_daily_serp_list Mahalo for your feedback!

By: Kaila Colbin

Kaila Colbin — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 06:13:46 +0000

Hi Danny,

I think Mahalo has an uphill battle ahead of them, although I do commend their efforts to bring human analysis to a technology that, like all technology, exists to serve its users.

The truth is I don’t think there is any viable way for paid, controlled, human-powered processing to keep up with the exponential growth of content. Obviously, they can’t just create pages for 10,000 terms and be done—they’d need constant revisiting and updating.

I’d be really interested to hear more about Mahalo’s long-term business model, to understand how Calacanis is handling scalability and maintenance.

All the best,
Kaila Colbin

By: Lucky Lester

Lucky Lester — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:52:39 +0000

Did a quick test to see what turned up for the term Poker, arguably the most popular search term these days and what did I get… We haven’t created a hand written page for that one yet. Generic reason offered as to why there were no results yet; they want to hand write results pages for the top 10,000 search terms.

Regardless of what anybody thinks about porn or gambling, these have always been among the most popular search terms and probably always will be. I don’t know, perhaps the good people at Mahola are starting at 10,000 and working their way backwards?

By: JEHochman

JEHochman — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:26:11 +0000

I am underwhelmed with Google Coop. Mahalo seems much more useful.

By: BlendahTom

BlendahTom — Thu, 31 May 2007 11:50:59 +0000

@JEHochman … I think Google already has that covered w/ their CSE/CoOp program…Mahalo is a combo of ChaCha and Wikipedia… I think that Jason Plans to build robust results pages for the Big 3 search engines when a query is made..The problem that I see is that where this kind of service would excel is in the vertical markets not so much on the top 10,000..

my .02

By: JEHochman

JEHochman — Thu, 31 May 2007 11:00:27 +0000

If it develops a substantial following, Calacanis can sell Mahalo to Google (or Microsoft), and the search engine can fuse the handcrafted results with their algorithmic results.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 31 May 2007 05:35:11 +0000

This is an interesting exercise in “cream-skimming”. Since it’s outsourcing to Google for 99.9% of the terms, it’s not really a general search engine – more like a vertical search, with “popular terms” as the area of expertise.

By the way:
“Plenty of search start-ups have assumed word-of-mouth … Why does Calacanis think Mahalo will be different …”
You missed the obvious answer: Because he’s an A-lister and is skilled in attention-baiting. It’s not an accident that Mahalo has A-list bloggers in its coverage area.

By: AdamJusko

AdamJusko — Thu, 31 May 2007 02:42:50 +0000

Mahalo sounds almost exactly like Bessed. I'd say your analysis of the pros and cons of the human-powered search engine are apt.

By: Ivan Pope

Ivan Pope — Thu, 31 May 2007 01:16:25 +0000

Well, warrabout dmoz - The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors http://dmoz.org/about.html

By: gary price

gary price — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:13:18 +0000

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TechXtra is a free service which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, thesis & dissertations, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.