Search Engine Tigers

“Do you use a lame algorithm?” asks Ask. Well, Ask, how about not using an algorithm, but instead using human editors to write all of the content? Is that lame enough? Yep, I’m talking about the ‘new’ search engine Mahalo, launched in alpha mode yesterday, run by a certain Jason Calacanis. Mahalo currently claims to have landing pages for the top 4,000 search terms prepared, with a further 6,000 to follow. Interesting, I wasn’t aware that Jason Calacanis and Sequoia Capital were top 4,000 search terms, but I guess you live and learn. Interestingly enough, given that the results pages that they do have links to a lot of wikipedia pages, there’s no entry for wikipedia…

Other interesting results, no pages for the most supported soccer teams in the world – Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona, etc, or even a nation like England. However, according to this site, the South African National Football Team is a top 4,000 search term…

What about local search? Well, there’s some in there, handy if you’re looking for Lisbon Hotels, although if you’re looking for a hotel in Lisbon you’re forced to select your SERP, as the ‘algorithm’ will only return the exact SERP on an exact match, even when there’s only one result – i.e. Bafana. As for other locations, it would seem from their plans that if you’re going to be looking for a locksmith in Lincoln, NE, this site will never have a result for you.

A human edited site will just not be able to scale to grab all of the long tail results that people are going to want. Yes, it may have some nice results for some searches that you’d want to do, but when you need to find something in a pinch, and you get the message that that SERP hasn’t been created yet, you’re going to stay away from it in the future.

What about relevancy? SERPs change, new data shows up, events happen. What’s the turn around time on the SERPs getting updated? What happens if there’s some major event in one of his categories, and Jonathan is out sick / doesn’t hear about it?

Then there’s the whole Calacanis factor. For those who don’t know, Jason Calacanis came out at SES Chicago in December last year and announced to a packed room of Search Marketers that SEO was BS. This, and his later statements comparing Search Marketers to Snake Oil Salesman have not endeared him to this particular crowd. Yes, it’s helped him to get exposure, and I know that there’s the old saying that anytime you get your name out in front of people it’s good, but I can’t imagine that the exposure that he’s been getting for this project is what he, or Sequoia Capital were hoping for. For example, Todd Malicoat, Andy Hagans, and Jennifer Laycock, to name but a few, have said their piece on Mahalo, and I can’t say I disagree with any of them, but given that I started this post by calling Mahalo lame, I guess you could have already figured that out.

So what could be done with this site to make it a destination site? I would say that the scope needs to be narrowed. Having it as the Search engine for 4,000-10,000 ‘popular’ terms is asking too little of a search engine. If they were to target a category such as celebrities, then they could become the goto site for celebrity information, similar to the way that imdb is the goto site for movie and actor information. Another alternative is for them to forget the search engine altogether and just become a data provider for other sites, I’m sure that IMDB would love to be able to easily expand out their results pages with the extra information that can be found on the Mahalo pages (for those actors that have had their SERP created).

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