Comments on: Chris Winfield in The LA Times: ‘Mahalo, Call it a search-engine curator’

By: Mexabet

Mexabet — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:00:34 +0000

I first heard about Mahalo here today and I browsed to their site to check it out. I searched for two terms and got the following results: 'We haven't created a page for "the best web directory" yet.' and 'We haven't created a page for "high quality link directory" yet.' When will those pages be created? I have to agree that the search engine is labor intensive and hence, will be hard to maintain. The site even features Site Search By Google, amongst other things, which tells me that the search engine hasn't yet arrived. It is clear to me that it is not yet ready for business and competition.

By: Chris Winfield

Chris Winfield — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:09:57 +0000

Thanks Jake!

By: Jake Matthews

Jake Matthews — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:06:01 +0000

Chris,

You say “Not because it returns the best result for the most popular searches but because most of the time it returns really good results for the obscure phrases.”

I completely agree! That’s a great way to put it and I’ve never heard that before.

By: Chris Winfield

Chris Winfield — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:39:41 +0000

Thanks Matt for the great new nickname

They need to scale pretty quickly or this is gonna look like month-old milk in a hurry.

Yeah – agreed. On some pages they are simply linking to tagged pages on popular blogs or search pages on news search engines – such as: http://www.mahalo.com/50_Cent which can work sometimes. But is this really the best source for Modest Mouse news? http://www.bestweekever.tv/?s=Modest+Mouse

By: Matt McGee

Matt McGee — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:27:52 +0000

Chris:

First, you are becoming SUCH a media darling. That’s my new nickname for you, dude.

Second, check out the profile of Mahalo writer/guide Andrew Kaufman:

http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Mahaloprofile?uid=30

How on earth can one person keep up with SO MANY freakin’ music pages? (He can’t.) They need to scale pretty quickly or this is gonna look like month-old milk in a hurry.

By: Chris Winfield

Chris Winfield — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:11:06 +0000

Agreed Janko. Another fascinating fact is what Google’s Udi Manber recently said at ‘Searchology‘:

Udi Manber, VP of Engineering, said that 20-25% of search queries each day are new, that’s an amazing fact….

By: Janko

Janko — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:05:37 +0000

I think scalabilty is the main issue here. I looked into some stats to compare Mahalo to popular sites, and guess what: It will never be like Del.icio.us, because Del.icio.us grows at a pace of 3000 to 6000 links per hour …