|
A preliminary test release version of a new search engine web site called Mahalo was launched on May 31, 2007 at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, California, and hopes to put a more human touch on web searching. Meaning, “thank you” in Hawaiian, Mahalo aims to be an anti-algorithm of sorts, a reaction against the traditional method used by other search engine sites which rely largely on automated formulas when choosing which search results to show. The company is the brainchild of Jason Calacanis, a well-known figure in Internet culture, who in 2003 founded blogging network Weblogs, which was purchased in 2005 by AOL for a reported $25 million. Calacanis is also known for operating the Silicon Alley Reporter between 1996 and 2001, a publication which covered New York City Internet news. Calacanis proclaims Mahalo to be the web’s “First human-powered search engine,” and is touted as working by “hand-crafting the best search results possible.” The company employs a staff of around 40 people to create result pages, currently limited to the most popular four thousand or so web searches, hand-picked by Mahalo staff members. The company is purposely writing custom search engine  results pages for only the most popular web searches, which nonetheless make up a large portion of all searching done on the web today. This would seem to position Mahalo more as a tool for those looking for links to basic information answering common questions than as a research tool for those seeking information about subject of a more obscure nature. Search engine industry leader Google has estimated that as many as 25 percent of the web searches they handle each day are new searches that they have never seen before, while Ask.com has noted figures as high as 60 percent. The company aims to have custom search result pages written for roughly ten thousand common subjects by the end of 2007, and are currently adding around 500 new search result pages each week, according to Mahalo’s Directory of User Experience Eric Stevens . Mahalo has been launched as an “alpha” release, a first test version of the service, and plans to remain so until the company’s staff members have written ten thousand custom search result pages, after which the service will enter the “beta” release phase until the 25,000 result page goal is reached. An official launch of the full version of the web site is not expected to happen until the end of 2008. Visitors can recommend links on any of the existing Mahalo search result pages once going through a free registration process, and these recommendations are then reviewed by the writer in charge of the related subject. Having a person in charge of each of the search result pages displayed is touted as having a strong bearing on eliminating links to web sites that offer poor quality or irrelevant information, or web sites set up primarily to make money from advertising, known as “spam sites.” Mahalo notes that, “Humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone.” Testing the New Mahalo Search Engine A search for Los Angeles hotels brought up a results page containing Mahalo’s top seven web site recommendations for the term, including the web sites of Frommer’s, Fodor’s and Lonely Planet. Also on the page was information from a Mahalo guide suggesting links to additional related information on other Mahalo results pages, including vacations, tours and restaurants in Las Angeles. Six basic pieces of information about Los Angeles, such as the population and name of the mayor, were also presented on the results page. The remainder of the search results page showed four categories of hotels in Los Angeles, a breakdown by price for luxury, moderately priced, and more affordable hotels, plus a listing showing youth hostels. The accompanying pictures show Search Engine World’s search results page, which includes the name of the Mahalo writer who created the “Los Angeles hotels” page, Nicole Gustas, and a link to more information about her. The writer biography pages on Mahalo contain a brief statement from the writer, and links to all of the other information on the web site that they have written. These biography pages also list a percentage figure showing how complete each page a particular writer maintains. Ms. Gusta’s biography page lists the 239 result pages she has written, and shows all as being between 60 percent and 90 percent complete. Individual searches for England, Canada, and Mexico did not return any relevant information from Mahalo’s writers. Searches for World War II, World War I, and war itself also returned no information specifically from Mahalo. Mahalo does however have dedicated search result pages for the German heavy metal band Rammstein, animated children’s television show SpongeBob SquarePants, and shoe company Adidas. A search for John F. Kennedy presented links to Mahalo’s seven most recommended web sites, including Wikipedia’s page about John F. Kennedy, the U.S. government’s web site, and  the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. These web site links were followed by links to recent relevant news articles, including three presented from Google News along with links to stories at The New York Times and the PR Newswire web sites. Also on the results page for John F. Kennedy were eleven additional categories, each containing between four and eleven recommended web site links. These categories included background and profile information, relevant blogs, memorials, photographs, audio and video, information on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, criticism, a timeline, material written by John F. Kennedy, along with books and satire about him. Mahalo’s writers, which the company refer to as guides, use other Internet research tools such as Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Microsoft’s Live Search, Flickr, Deli.cio.us, along with what the company notes on their web site as, “dozens of other services,” in order to, “hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SERPs available today," referring to search engine results page. The acronym SERP was coined in 1999 by Brett Tabke, CEO and founder of Webmaster World, a well-known web site for web site administrators. Mahalo has been started with financial backing from investors with a great deal of venture capital, including Mark Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, who has also financially backed both Google and Yahoo, PayPal’s co-founder Elon Musk, and Ted Leonsis, AOL’s vice chairman. The company aims to eventually be supported by advertising revenue, and currently displays some Google advertising along with certain search results. During upcoming months Mahalo plans to gradually incorporate more advertising on the new web site. Acknowledging the young age of the company, Calacanis noted in a statement that, “We're in month five of a five-year project." New Mahalo Search Engine Similar to Early Web Project Mahalo may not be the first human-powered search engine site, as projects using similar methods have been around since February of 1994, when Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang started their “Jerry’s and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” in an effort to organize their own favorite Internet web sites. Mahalo also faces the task of competing with and differentiating itself from web sites such as About.com and the Open Directory Project, the most comprehensive directory of the web, which is entirely edited by humans. The Open Directory Project is an Open Source inspired listing of web sites, and is not a traditional search engine. The project does not provide search result pages ranking web sites, but instead strives to simply list the contents of the web in thousands of topical categories. The Open Directory Project, unlike Mahalo, relies largely on the volunteer efforts of writers and editors. Mahalo has appeared at a time when algorithm-based search engines such as Google have come under attack for being decidedly too automated, and not providing enough human influence to filter out search results that don’t help web searchers find the information they are seeking. Mahalo does however rely on Google for providing search results about subjects their own staff writers have not yet created results pages for. Calacanis goes as far as saying that, “Every innovation that Google comes up with becomes another tool for us to move up the stack," but acknowledges the important of Google to Mahalo, saying that, “We are standing on the shoulders of giants.” At Google the all-powerful algorithm and the recent spate of negative reactions to such fully-automated web searching solutions has sparked some movement towards showing the more human side of the Mountain View, California based company. Matt Cutts, search quality engineer at Google, is quoted by Nancy Gohring of IDG Communications News Service in a June 4, 2007 InfoWorld article as saying, “People think of Google as pure algorithms,” and that Google has, “recently begun trying to communicate the fact that we're not averse to using some manual intervention." The new Mahalo search engine site represents an interesting alternative to its well-established competition. Related Links:
|
11:36 am on June 6, 2007 (utc 0)
