If you haven’t yet stumbled across it, take a gander at Mahalo, a community-created search engine that’s trying to build a credible guide for popular web searches. Full-time and part-time “guides” build results pages for popular searches, saving the average Googler the hassle of wading through 7,000,000 results for Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.
This could be an interesting, useful tool for wading through the thicket of pop culture weblinks. What makes me a little nervous, though, are the pages built around, say, mental health topics, or literature. If Wikipedia is your first, or even your third, pick for a serious research topic, that’s a problem. Sure, trained searchers know it’s a good “foot in the door” technique, but does the average web browser? More ominously, does the average web browser care?
What’s really interesting about Mahalo’s community-built results is that if you sign up to be a guide, or participate in the social community they call the Greenhouse, you can get paid for your contribution. Or, in other words, if you can do better, prove it…to the tune of $10-$15 per accepted results page. While this is a decided improvement over search engines like ChaCha, which pay their professional guides only pennies per search (or $5.00 per live chat hour if their FAQ is accurate), it’s still somewhat disturbing for those of us who spent a lot of time and money on our professional degrees. Note that in neither Mahalo nor Cha-Cha is there any sort of library or research expertise needed to be considered “professional.”
Thoughts? I suppose I come to both bury Mahalo and to praise it. It’s a great hammer, as hammers go. Would that every web searching problem were a nail.
Jason said,
December 18, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Thanks for taking the time to consider what we’re doing at Mahalo!
Including Wikipedia is a debated issue here at Mahalo since sometimes the pages are amazing and other times they are… well…. less than amazing.
Of course, they also run the risk of being vandalized at times, etc.
We’ve come to the decision that folks expect it to be there and folks understand–or are coming to understand–that the Wikipedia is a user edited site and to take it as such.
The $15 a search result isn’t huge pay, but it’s a lot more than folks make editing wikipedia or making Squidoo lenses. So, we’re happy with that number right now, and we proud to be paying folks when everyone else seems to be “crowd sourcing” — as in not paying folks!
As to the level of expertise we don’t claim to be experts at the subjects–although sometimes we are. We claim to be good, and mostly great, at getting you to the experts.
That’s the goal really.. we don’t want to compete with the folks we’re linking to (i.e. in health). We want to be organize those folks.
Finally, we’re only six month in and the pages are MUCH better than machine search… so, imagine how good these pages will be in another six to 18 months of public review/revisions.
All the best, Jason
(CEO and founder of Mahalo.com)
did you see the social network we just launched?
http://www.mahalo.com/member/Jasoncalacanis
That’s going to help with keeping the pages fresh and with making them better.
LAV said,
December 19, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Hi Jason – thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. I realize this must be a very hectic time for you and your new company. It will be really interesting to watch as you grow and develop, and I wish you all the best.
I’m just curious as to one or two things, really:
1) In terms of organization, are you familiar with existing mega-search sites like MedlinePlus, The Librarian’s Index to the Internet, and The Internet Public Library?
2) Are any of the founders/staff involved with librarianship and/or information technology? We love to organize things. It’s what we do, and what we’re trained for.
Just curious. What I’d really like to do is interview you at length for a future blog installment – would you be open to that?