I was visiting your blog today, and I noticed that Advertising Age today and noticed Mark Simon criticized Mahalo. Evidently, he’s can’t believe that human powered search can work. He specifically says:

6. “HUMAN-POWERED” SEARCH ENGINES.
The reason search engines are much better places to find information than directories is because they leverage automation to do the grunt work that human editors used to do.

Well, Jason, I can’t help but agree. As I’ve pointed out, the guides you have working on Mahalo are having some difficulty applying the style guide, catching dead links, and catching sneaky redirects that appear after the page is published. Still, I know you plan to persist in the insane endeavor you call “Mahalo”.

As long as you are, I’d like to make a few suggestions. I think you will recognize the underlying goal of each: Let computers and ‘bot do what they do well, let humans do what they do well!

So, here goes:

1. Create ‘bots to count ads:
   Problem: Currently, your guides evidently need to sift through hundreds and hundreds of ad laden pages to find the ones that aren’t full of ads. This is a costly waste of time. Their time would be better spent comparing the less ad-intensive sites and deciding which is best.

   Solution: Write a ‘bot that permits the user to enter a Google search. After the Google search is run, let the ‘bot load the content of each page, identifies each (using the same method available to the FireFox extension AdBlockerPlus) and count the number of ads. Then return a link results page that includes only pages with limited numbers of ads.

   To catch cloaked affiliate ads, you may need to extend the ‘bot to follow all links and watch whether the link passes through a redirect. Flag those as suspicious.

2. Create ‘bots to discover redirects on Mahalo links:Problem: Aggressive marketers will identify Mahalo pages, and persuade the page owner to allow them to redirect the page to a substitute page. Josiah Cole notes this happened to Mahalo’s Jesus in Food page.

   Solution: Store the content of original pages. Write a ‘bot that loads each link on Mahalo. Record the url of the final destination page. If the url has changed, have this noted in a database. Send humans to check that page promptly.

3. Create ‘bots to notice changes in content.Problem: Links die. This has already happened. I identified five several dead-ish links at new sources on your Change page. They weren’t entirely dead, but the story had moved.

   Solution: Cache the source of all pages linked on Mahalo. Write a ‘bot that compare the current version of pages to old pages using the sorts of algorithms used by plagiarism checkers. (Andy Beard described a Iplagiarism.) When the content of the new site deviates substantially from the old content, send a human to check the page.

4. Create online rubrics to ensure style guides are followed.Problem: Those styles guides are long. Sometimes they are ambiguous. There is some inconsistency in applying the rules.

   Solution: Have the guides fill out a checklist covering the top ten spammy features only humans can find. No content above the fold? Check a box. Found contact email? Check. Phone? Check. That sort of thing. If the page has to many danger flags, the rubric will catch it.

5. Create ‘bots that check for spam words:Problem: Yes, searches for “Jason Calacanis” point to links about lesbians making out.

   Solution: When that ‘bot I suggested above loads all the Google search results, have it compare the content to a blacklist of spam terms. Lesbians is in my SpamKarma blacklist– put it in your Mahalo blacklist. If the ‘bot finds a bunch of porn terms, you can be pretty sure it’s a porn site. The guides don’t need to waste their time checking it!

6. Send me a huge box of luxury yarn. Or maybe season tickets to the Lyric Opera. Or something. Ok. This won’t help you at all. But you keep joking you should put me on the payroll.

   What you really should do is find someone whose first reaction to criticism of Mahalo is to assume there is a problem, and who then says: “If this is a problem, how could we fix it?”

‘Bot can help this insane idea scale.

Heck, if you write the correct ‘bot to help the humans, there is a chance you can actually get Mahalo to work within some reasonable budget. Let’s face it, you can hope the public will report your dead links. But in reality, you’ll find more often “the public” will be very eager to suggest their own sites. (For example: my knitting blog is the best blog and belongs on Mahalo. Period. )

Heck, with luck, you’ll find these ‘bots will help you explain why my knitting blog is not the best one (even though it is.)

P.S. I thought explaining how the guides can use javascript to quickly find the duplicate content I told you about before was just the right solution. Not too complicated, implemented quickly. I still think Mahalo isn’t any good yet, but I can now see why they pay you the big bucks.

P.S.S. To add to the list– there’s no reason you can’t write the bot to do the plagiarism checks before the human ever loads the page!

When I first read that one of the Mahalo Follow’s features was its ability to detect relevant links to a web site viewed in the browser, I thought, “What fun!” So, I eagerly dashed to your blog to give Mahalo Follow’s “concurrent search” a test. (I saw that this morning you were requesting your readers Stumble something or other. Brilliant post, btw.)

Of course, Mahalo Follow was everything I expected. It figured out the the content on your today’s blog entries are is somehow associated with “Pink”, “Peaches”, “Scott Storch” and “Christina Aguilara”. Amazing!

I understand Danny Sullivan had the gall to criticize Mahalo Follow for “funky” results. Evidently, he thinks Mahalo is flawed because it returns results like “Elton John” when you search “Simpsons movie”.

You, Jason patiently explained that the keyword correlation is poor because Mahalo itself contains so few search results. That’s telling Danny!

Clearly, when a web page (like yours) contain words that have been included in Mahalo search, the results are great!

After all, the terrific results like one I just showed were based on keywords contained both in your blog post and Mahalo search, including: “mahalo, comments, email, covers, silicon, reporter, alley, berry, ombudsman, follow, pink, ping, any, feedback, dmozodp, editors, weekend, los, off, love”.

But does Mahalo do as well if we visit other people’s pages?

I was so inspired by the first result, I thought I’d check out articles listed in Mahalo press coverage . (BTW. I like the dolphins on that browser extension. I bet you picked dolphins because their silly tricks are so entertaining, right? )

I always enjoy Mashable, so I clicked the link to their review of your nifty dolphin encrusted plugin extension. I must say, their title, Mahalo Follow Offers Poor Comparative Search Tools, is rather harsh. The comments in that article were even harsher.

Imagine, someone named “Marc” said, “…but the execution is worthlessly uninspired and no more usable than a generic phpLinkDirectory site.”

So unjustified! How can something as entertaining as Mahalo be called unusable?

Who could fail to delight in the discovery that Mashable’s discussion of your nifty new video-game like browser extension matches your splendid article, “How to Book a Cheap Flight”?

Wow!

(That splendid match is based on these key terms: “about mahalo, search, follow, results, post, poor, offers, new, comparative, tools, trackbacks, related, entries, well, better, sites, next, feature, comment, browser.” )

So, congratulations Jason. Surfing the web is more enjoyable than ever now that I can view Mahalo search results in the sidebar. I’m predict great success now that you have decided to focus on what Mahalo does best: info-tainment!

Sincerely,

P.S. I also enjoyed the sidebar results when I visited Wikipedia’s page on Genesis. I was nearly overcome when I saw that Bartleby’s entry for the bible matches “Spiderman” and “Spider-man Films”, and Google’s search on “double crochet” matches “Indian National Cricket Team”.

In the course of the conversation, Melinda, who does not like Kielbasa, described the process of creating the search results for the Kielbasa search results page. She said:

I put my best finger forward and created what I think is a page that were one to search for Kielbasa they would find the needed information without having to look through hundreds of results as I did. I ran into numerous pages of supposed Kielbasa recipes only to be linked to pages full of advertisements.

(Emphasis added.)

Mind you, I’m not sure I, or anyone, knows what the “needed information” is when one searches for “kielbasa”. That said, Mahalo’s top seven results are shown to the right. Most contain ads; I’ve circled the ones I consider riddled with ads.

Still, if Melinda is correct, we will find “the needed information” on these pages that percolated up as she sorted through hundreds of results available on Google. Presumably, we will find also find fewer ads and/or better information than on results returned by Google.

Comparison shows just as many (if not more) ads on Mahalo search results as on Google search results.

First, let’s look at the #1 result on both pages: Wikipedia. So far we have a tie between Mahalo and Google. Now, let’s examine the #2 results.

#2 Keibasa result on Google: Some ads.

The number 1 result on Google is currently Cooks.com recipe search for Kielbasa. If you click the image to make it larger and look at the central panel at Cooks.com, you’ll see that Cooks.com has 317 recipes for Kielbasa; the top 10 are provided on #1 search result returned by Google. Brief introductions, which mention ingredients are provided for each recipe.

Two clealry identifiable recipe descriptions appear above the fold, where the person doing the search can find them. More are revealed if you scroll. The recipe descriptions include ingredients, which permits me to read, and click links to read the kielbasa recipes that look yummy to me.

Honestly, if I were looking for kielbasa recipes, I would be very happy with the #1 search result returned by Google.

What about ads?

Admittedly, the search result page contains ads. There’s a banner ad across the top and along the side. There are some Google adsense below the fold. We see similar results if we visit the recipe pages at Cooks.com.

But is this a lot of ads? Why don’t we defer our decision until after we look at the results at Mahalo?

#2 Kielbasa result on Mahalo: Loaded with ads.

The #2 Mahalo kielbasa results appears to be Martha Stewart’s recipe for “Roasted Keilbasa.”

Let’s examine this page carefully: there is no recipe above the fold. In fact, when I first arrived at the page, I wasn’t sure I would find any recipe.

Why not? Because above the fold we are told a recipe for the item pictured comes from Martha’s book “Entertaining”; for all we know, we will be lead to a link to buy the book. In fact, above the fold we see only ads and navigation.

When we scroll down, we find a rather mundane recipe. Martha uses a lot of words but the instructions but essentially says this: Simmer the kielbasa in water, then roast. Serve with horseradish on rye bread.

That’s the sort of recipe one might expect to find printed on package of Kielbasa one finds in the local grocery store. Two rather simpler recipes appear on Eckrich Kielbasa.

Martha’s recipe, highlighted at Mahalo, may save someone’s mom, somewhere some time. But I doubt it.

Are there more ads on Martha’s page?

Starting from the top we see:

1. Yellow buttons with the word ‘magazines’ link to pages enticing us to fork over money and subscribe to Martha Stewart publications. A ‘radio’ link to page promoting Martha’s radio program. The word ’subscribe’ links to page suggesting we hand over money to subscribe to a variety of Martha Stewart products.

   Were these links on another site passing through an affiliate referral, no one would deny they are ads. On Martha’s site, they are still ads.

2. A banner ad across the top the page. A banner ad along the side. Scrolling down reveals more ads to Martha Stewart products below the recipe. (Had there been no other ads, this would have resulted in a tie with Cooks.com!)
3. When you scroll down further you find ads for additional Martha Stewart products and web sites.

Clearly, what we have found one big humogous ad!

(Martha is a savvy business woman. She does not give valuable stuff away for free!)

Are there ads on the other Mahalo results?

Absolutely! The Amazon.com’s page is nothing but a set of links to third party Amazon.com vendors. It’s one big ad. The ads on Epicurious move!

Are you not convinced yet?

If you are not convinced Mahalo search results have more ads than Google search results, I invite you to visit Google’s kielbasa search results and compare them to Mahalo results.

Have fun!

Evidently, you, Jason, think Skype isn’t big news.

Bless your heart, Jason, but Skype is big news. Or at least, it was big news to the many who searched for information yesterday. They couldn’t find that information about the outage on Mahalo.

Luckily, they could find the news they sought on Google and Technorati.

Finding the information you want: that’s what people use search engines for. If Mahalo doesn’t find them, Mahalo is irrelevant.

P.S. I’m glad to see you thought to add the Skype stub after Allen out Mahalo’s lapse.

So “we” decided to search for costumes and searched for “Tango”:

I told her I didn’t know, but that, evidently, you can use Mahalo to avoid trial and error when searching. Or at least, you can avoid searching by trial and error if you are interseted in “elective genitoplasty”. Mom gave me that look again.

She then squinted, pointed toward the bottom of the screen and said: “Oh, but that looks relevant”. I replied, “Yes, those are the Google results.” Mom said, “Oh. . . . Why don’t we use Google?”

Then, she and I entered a few terms in Google search and within 1 minute found several YouTube “tango” videos. After viewing several, we agreed, that this skirt is “just right” for a 48 year old woman who just started learning the tango 2 months ago:

When we were finished looking for outfits, we went to the fruit bowl and shared a mango. Mom looked a little whimsical ans sighed, “When you were little, you loved Mangoes.” I replied, “I still do!” Then we both both laughed.

Mahalo Jason!

P.S. Jason, I noticed you de-activated comments and on http://blog.mahalo.com . I’m having trouble with my trackbacks took. For some reason, they aren’t showing. When I sort it out, I’ll let you know. Then we can both fix our problems!

Don’t believe me? Here are the results returned for “knitting twice into same stitch”:

Words fail me! That’s a lie: Like Mimi in “La Boheme”, words never fail me.

How irrelevant are these results?

Here’s my analysis of the top four results for knitting twice in a same stitch:

• Top result: Crochet. I knit. I crochet. This result is irrelevant.
• Second result: Sewing: I sew. Irrelevant.
• Third and fourth result: Gay Marriage?! Asteroids?!!! Do I even need to say anything?

Naturally, when I saw these, I blinked then refreshed the screen. Repeating Mahalo searches give different related results! The second search included “Banana Peppers” and “Needlepoint”.

Due to “search engine attention deficit disorder” (SEADD), I forgot all about knitting and clicked “Banana Peppers”; that lead me to links for pepper recipes. (How miraculously handy! The hot peppers in my garden are ripening right now. )

I was having so much fun, I felt moved to say, “Thank you, Mahalo!”

But maybe that result is only funny because that search string is just way too obscure.

Who would search “knitting twice into same stitch”?

Knitters, you silly goose! When testing the splendor and power of Mahalo, I thought to visit the most recent sitemeter results for my knitting blog, scan for google referrers and enter the very first one I found.

Yes, that’s the sort of search term actual honest to goodness knitters enter at Google. I think knitters who use Mahalo will find the results, ahem, remarkable¹ and say “Mahalo? Merci!”

But maybe I’m not being fair to Mahalo. . .

As we all know, Mr. Calacanis tells us we should use his baby Mahalo before Google because we can’t lose anything. After all, Mahalo sometimes also returns the Google results.

All we searchers need to do is grow a few seconds older as we scroll down to find the nice relevant Google results. Hey, look at the only Google result that managed to appear above the fold. That’s my knitting blog! Whoo hoo!

Of course, if you’d visited Google, you would have seen many relevant results without wasting time laughing at the idea that “Gay Marriage” had something to do with knitting.

But get this: Jason thinks wasting our time protects us!

Yep, Jason tells us Mahalo “protects” middle aged motherly sorts. Had we visited Google, we might have been exposed to… to…

Oh, never mind. We grandmotherly knitters need to made aware of political hot potatoes like gay marriage. ‘Cuz evidently, we wouldn’t learn about the otherwise. So, “Danke, Mahalo!”

What if I search something shorter: “knitting”?

I spit coffee on the screen when I saw the top “relevant” result is “socks” .

Jason, bless your heart², hand knitters who enjoy knitting socks don’t buy socks. By the way, quilts, quilting and crochet are also not relevant search results.

Now, let’s look at the fail safe: the Google result that appears above the fold. It’s “About.com.” I’m no SEO expert, but why do I not believe Mahalo “protects’ me from heavily optimized SEO sites?

“Tack så mycket, Mahalo!”

But maybe the silly irrelevant results only appear when Jason has not yet paid a human to sift through the Google search results to come up with “more perfect” results.

What about Crochet?

It turns out that Jason has gotten
Lon Harris to create a perfect search result for Crochet. Lon has degrees in English and History and lists many interests: These interest do not include anything related to fiber arts. Lon blogs about movies.

Many crocheters watch movies while crocheting. So, without prejudice, let’s examine the top seven results. I find Wikipedia and About.com.

As a crafter, I know that About.com is generally an utterly useless site. I clicked First Steps In Learning How To Crochet, and can immediately see it not only does not teach anyone how to crochet, it also sends the hopeful crochet student to a series of eight About.com pages that are supposed to be a series teaching you how to create a chain.

Snort! Any garden variety crochet blogger would write that lesson up in one page!

For what it’s worth, I have long suspected About.com’s current high engine ranks are due to hiring experienced SEOs.

So, Jason: Bless Your Heart. If you don’t want Mahalo to be totally gamed by the SEO’s maybe you should hire someone who crochets to write the perfect crochet search results page?

Someone who crochets would likely suggest you include a link to The Crochet Guild of America more useful than About.com? It’s the second result on Google. It’s also the major crochet guild in the US and a great resource.

Are all the “crochet” search results bad?

There are a few good links on the crochet search results page. I’ve always liked Monster Crochet. Google’s blog search for crochet is a wonderful resource. I was glad to see Drew, The Crochet Dude, made the cut. He’s the only crochet designer who ever left a comment at my knitting blog. So, I can vouch for three of the links.

The results are limited

But even though some of the results on Mahalo are decent, they are limited. They list only a few crochet magazines– I’m puzzled that the popular Interweave Crochet is missing. I think it’s the only crochet magazine carried at the Barnes and Nobles in Naperville, Illinois.

But no matter, results don’t have to be all inclusive. I saw all those nice headings and thought, “I bet the heading ‘Crochet Magazines’, that will turn out to be a link to help me find Crochet Magazines.”

But no. The headings are not links. Evidently, Mahalo wants to “protect” me from finding crochet magazines they did not highlight!

“Labai achiu, Mahalo!”

Summary: No thank you Mahalo!

For now, I’m going to say “Gracias, no.” to Mahalo because:

1. I don’t need to be “protected” from over SEO’d sites.
2. Even if I did need protection, Mahalo sends me to SEO’d sites.
3. Someone may find Mahalo’s human powered search results relevant, but that someone ain’t me!
4. Because of Jason’s fetish for protecting the public, I can’t drill down from the human powered search results to find what I want to find and
5. The non-human powered ones are just laughably irrelevant.

 
Oh, you now I’m lying. I will be returning to Mahalo next month. And so will you. Because we all want to see if Jason’s people still suggest “Gay Marriage” is a related to “knitting twice in same stitch”.

Hat tip to Andy Beard for drawing my attention to recent “improvement” to Mahalo.