Mahalo: POS Search Engine!

Did you see Jason Calacanis’s self promotional post about his search engine, Mahalo? If you did, you might not realize his Mahalo is a piece of shhh. . a side-splittingly funny search engine!

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.