Mahalo Follow: As fun as Pac Man!
Dear Jason,
Following your recommendation, I installed “Mahalo Follow”. I’m happy to report that I haven’t had so much fun since I played my first video game. Congratulations on discovering Mahalo’s true calling: entertainment!
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,
Lucia
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”.
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10 Responses to “Mahalo Follow: As fun as Pac Man!”
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Give it time… right now it’s a beta product and it’s learning. When you come to pages with clean headlines and design about large topics it does well. When you got to general topics it has a harder time.
I think in another six to 12 months it will do much better.
Mahalo again for trying it and for giving some much great advice to Mahalo.com!
best j
Jason,
Thanks for commenting. It’s nice to see you are so optimistic about your baby.
However, I must say it appears the more key terms a page matches, the sillier the comparative results look. If so, the Mahalo follow results will be rather worse when your team adds more key word searches to Mahalo.
Unfortunately, I found very, very few pages that returned good results. Still, I’m sure some must exist. No doubt your team has spent some time finding some examples and will supply you with the best ones to post at your blog.
Yes, I could point out a ton of direct hits… it’s beta software and concurrent search will never be perfect. That’s why we’re showing what keywords it’s matching against at the bottom.
Great hits:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2980323
http://perezhilton.com/?p=3883
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/17/utah.mine/index.html
A lot of it has to do with the non-standard page design we see on the web. Sometime Follow picks up the navigation or sidebar (i.e. it will pull in News, About, RSS, etc). We’re learning when to pull these out and when to leave them in (i.e. a story about “RSS in the News” should have our RSS and News SERPs come up, but a story on the NYT that is about Paris shouldn’t have RSS and News come up just because those words are all over the page.).
give it time…. just like the rest of Mahalo. It’s a five year project and we’re about 5-10% done.
mahalo again for all the cycles you’re giving Mahalo.com. This feedback is really helping us refine the project… please keep it up!
all the best,
Jason
Jason’s always so classy — as proof, he didn’t point out that the first link needs to be fixed.
I, on the other hand, am called “Venomous” for a reason. ;P
Jason, You’re entirely welcome for the cycles. If it helps, great!
I don’t know you from Adam, so I’m guessing you can pretty much figure I have no particular axe to grind with regard to you or your product. (If I had an axe to grind, I’d enter your domain into my “NoOldSpamLinks” plugin and auto-nofollow the links in 10 days. You’ll see your links remain follow. John Chow’s auto-nofollow.)
I’m posting about Mahalo because I find the current incarnation of Mahalo amusing. Also, I like Alice Roosevelt’s motto: “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone come and sit by me.”
I’ll likely post until Mahalo starts returning non-silly results.
As to the multi-word problem suggestion, based on what I see, I’m not entirely sure the design of the page is the full problem. (I’m willing to believe it’s part of the problem.)
On blogs, do look for any “tags” or “categories”. If you find them, you’ve just found something you can treat as a flare.
I conveniently included some in this post, and guess what? The comparative results are doing kinda sorta ok on this page. Maybe you do it, because the comparitive results I see here may be the best ones I’ve run across on my own! (Of course, I must have typed “Mahalo” a billion times!)
Thanks Kate. I spelled his last name wrong. (I guess that proves I don’t know him from Adam?) Now he has a real link!
MF is a decent tool.. glad i gave it a shot
@Stars,
Could you tell us a little more? How are you using the plugin? (Only when searching at Google? Or when surfing?) Did you find it a bit slow to load the secondary results? Etc.
Be patient, give it time and I think it will become a great product.
Mr. Giant. I’m patient. I’m looking forward to seeing what this becomes.
Jason has released it now and requested feedback. I’m assuming Jason is sincere when he says he welcomes any and all comments and believes they will help his team improve his product, and I’m providing my feedback.