Mahalo: a Web 2.0 Search Engine

The purpose of this post is two-fold:

• To introduce you to Mahalo, a different type of search engine. You can use it to supplement your Google, Yahoo!, and MSN searches.
• Refer you to an interesting article on Web 2.0, as some food for thought, with my goal being to get your comments on where the web is headed (and particularly on what you think of Web 2.0).

Mahalo: an Introduction

Mahalo is a relatively new search engine, still in beta, that searches articles that members submit and vote on. Becoming a member is really simple: just choose an account name and password, and you’re in. I signed up a couple of months ago and have been experimenting with it a couple of days per week.

The premise behind Mahalo, which is the brainchild of Jason Calacanis, is that it makes available the most popular topics, because (1) the topics are submitted by people interested in them, and (2) the more votes an article gets, the higher it appears in the search results.

• How Google, Yahoo!, and MSN do it:
• The primary search engines, with Google being the giant among the three, have developed complex algorithms to help you find the most relevant content when you do a search. When you think of what these engines have to do, it will amaze you. They have to sift through literally millions of web sites, pick out keywords, determine the credibility of each article, filter out duplicate pages, and so on. In determining credibility, they have to consider such things as which other sites have linked to an article, the age of the article, whether the site is hosted on a cheap host, and on and on. And, they have to do this quickly: to examine millions of sites, one cannot spend a lot of time on each. It is truly fascinating stuff.

Anyway, Mahalo is starting to get some traction. For example, if you do a Google search for “Getting Things Done,” the item that appears at the top of the list is the Mahalo Top 7 List for Getting Things Done:

If you visit the Mahalo site and search there for “Getting Things Done,” you get this same Top 7 List. Interestingly, though, if you search for GTD, you get a different list:

To me, this list is actually more interesting than the Top 7 List. With this one, you actually get to see a list of GTD-related web sites, which have been submitted by Mahalo members.

Note that almost all of the articles have only one vote: a few have two. This implies that GTD is not a very popular topic with Mahalo members, who are probably a good cross-section of all web users. Hence, in the scheme of things, GTD is not a hugely popular topic. The things that are really popular are celebrity happenings, earthquakes and other natural disasters, political events and opinions, and so on. These are the kinds of things that end up on the Mahalo front page.

This suggests that Mahalo is not going to be a great resource for you for every topic you might be interested in. At least not yet. In time, as its member base grows, the depth of coverage of topics will expand.

But, regardless, it is already an interesting resource, and one that you may want to add to your toolkit.

What is Web 2.0 and What Does It Have To Do With This?

Tim O’Reilly, a true technosphere visionary, recently wrote an article entitled Why search competition isn’t the point. One of the many great points he makes in this article is that

“In fact, one of my short definitions of Web 2.0 is the design of systems that get better the more people use them.”

Great definition! It seems to me that Mahalo fits this definition perfectly. The more people that use it, the more it will benefit from the wisdom of the masses.

I think society is striving for more wisdom of the masses. People still use blogs as a source of information, but are commenting on blogs less and less, so blogs are not providing the wisdom of the masses like they did when people commented a lot more.

Aaron Wall recently wrote an article entitled Blogging: no longer a unique business strategy. In it, he notes that

“A marketer who has studied online marketing for nearly a decade got 0 comments and 0 inbound links for writing an 8 page blog post of quality content.”

Interesting isn’t it? A year or so ago, that article probably would have gotten dozens of thoughtful comments and insights, but now it has zero.

I’ve seen this happen in this blog. For example, there have been several instances where someone left a comment for me on Twitter saying “great article,” without leaving a comment. And, that is fine with me. I’ve done the same thing with other blog authors. I read one of their posts, and send them a Twitter message telling them it’s great and then I move onto something else. Some blogs still receive a lot of comments, of course, but many blog authors will tell you the comments on their blogs are decreasing even as readership increases.

The point is: the dynamics of the web are changing. This is all rather exciting to me. In my 59 years, I’ve seen society make several transitions in how it manages and uses information. Looks like I’ll get to witness another one as Web 2.0 matures.

Your thoughts?