We have come full circle
If it wasn’t for Veronica Belmont of CNET, who officially announced that she’s going quit CNET and go to this exciting new startup called Mahalo, I wouldn’t have even found out about it. What is Mahalo? It is a People-powered search engine. What does that mean? Basically a bunch of people, many, many people, known as Guides, attempt to create search engine result pages of popular search terms.
How is this different from Google? For one, It is more structured. For example, every search result page will have the Mahalo Top 7, Guide Notes, and Fast Facts. Standard sub topics such as Blogs, Forums, Videos, News and Articles, and Pictures make the results easier to read. Secondly, there’s no spam. With more policing of the links, you can be quite sure that the links on the results page will not lure you to phishing sites.
I find this a very interesting concept, but will it be successful? Weren’t intelligent algorithms created (Google) in search engines so that we can get more accurate and objective search results? True, results compiled by people are much more meaningful, because sometimes the more useful information are 10 pages down, while the less relevant ones populate the first two pages. But one cannot argue that automated generation sure beats humans in terms of speed. Google’s “spiders” can index webpages faster than humanly possible, and if you are searching for a topic that requires new information fast, the people-powered search engine will lose. However, if you are looking at certain topics that are historical, academic, or knowledge-sharing (tutorials, how-tos, references) in nature, the latter will prevail.
Say you are a new Mom, and you want to find out about the different stages of pregnancy, and what resources there are available online. Searching on Google might only provide you with a few big sites like Babycenter, AskDrSears, and maybe some articles on About.com, but what about sites like Maya’s Mom, Babble, and MommyClicks? It’s hard to search for online communities that might actually be more useful to a new Mom who doesn’t know anything about babies and want to get to find answers from real people. In this scenario, Mahalo will be a very useful search engine to get answers from. Ideally, it should have a search result for “New Mom”, where the Guides would have compiled a list of tried and true useful sites that would help the new mother in search for information.
Another scenario - I want to find out if my favorite game’s website has been launched or not. If I use Mahalo, the Guides might not have found out about that site’s URL and updated the page, but if I use Google, any new site created, if created well, would appear on the Google’s search result page very soon.
So here’s the question - Will Mahalo’s Guides be diligent enough to attempt to constantly update the search result pages as new sites are created? What’s stopping someone, or a company, even, to “bribe” Guides so that he/she will post the link to THEIR page rather than a competitor’s? Gone is the objectivity of the results.
Having said that, I still find this idea by Mahalo something that definitely has to be tried out in the real world before any conclusions can be drawn from it, or what effects it has on how we do search in the future (humans and/or robots?). Right now its too early tell. I’ve already signed up to be a Part-Time Guide, and will try to contribute as much as I can to this, and I really want to see how it grows, or not grow. This is very similar to past ventures like dmoz, wikipedia, suite101, and even about.com, so we’ll see. Do check it out and let me know what you think.
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