Remarkablogger

The Usual Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

You want to write a post for your blog that you realize is going to require some research. You can’t take forever. Time is running out if you’re to write the post according to your usual schedule and make it a good one. Okay, first things first: hit the Google, right? Of course! What else could there possibly be? What’s this? In the top five results for just about anything is… a Wikipedia entry. Hmmm… you know better than that. Citing Wikipedia is the laziest disservice to your readers you could possibly foist upon them. So you keep… searching. And it’s not that search doesn’t work. Of course it does. Great for some things, not so great for others. I guess the real question is: does it work the best? In some situations, I don’t think it does work the best. There have been times when I’ve spent a great deal of time searching like an expert on Google and I still come up with less than wonderful sources of research information.

Mahalo What?

Mahalo is the new project (well funded by early venture capital) by Jason Calicanis, a prolific and polarizing internet entrepreneur. Mahalo is human-curated search. Instead of your search results coming from an algorithm, they are a human-edited list of links and information. Mahalo is the Hawaiian word for “thank you.” This article isn’t about whether Mahalo is better than Google, but whether or not it can help you do better blog research. It’s not an either/or thing, anyway, since Google search results appear at the bottom of Mahalo pages.

Machine vs. Human

If I do a search for, say, “green tea heath benefits” on Google, here’s what I get:

As you can see, there’s good ol’ Wikipedia in the top five. These results are disappointing to me. About.com is basically a worthless advertising sinkhole, that’s out, too. (I’m sure the fact that About has a ton of AdSense ads has nothing whatsoever to do with their number one placement.) I need to start over and–one would think–refine my terms. Oddly enough, a more general search for only the words “green tea” give me better results, with a medical study in the top ten. Here’s what “green tea health benefits” gets me on Mahalo:

At first look this also appears disappointing. The link to “green tea” is a great resource page, but again it’s for a general term rather than a specific one, which is counterintuitive when it comes to search, in my opinion. If had done a general search on Google for just the keywords “green tea” I would have found what I wanted immediately and I never would have gone to Mahalo. But that’s the really interesting part about this, because Google results are at the bottom on a Mahalo page anyway, so really it makes sense to begin with Mahalo. When I follow the Mahalo link for green tea, I come to a page whose organization makes much more sense to me as a human being. Several of the top seven links are what I’m looking for, as shown in the picture below:

Mahalo Follow

If you rock the Firefox web browser (of course you do, because you’re a better blogger), you can download the Mahalo Follow addon. Mahalo Follow is a toolbar/sidebar combo. I’m not a big fan of toolbars adding weight to the top of my screen, but the Follow sidebar opens automatically when you search if there’s an exact match for your search keywords at Mahalo. It also adds Mahalo to the built-in search box for Firefox, which is nice.

I like Mahalo Follow because it allows me to make comparisons between the human-edited Mahalo results, which are like a cross between a wiki page and traditional search results, and a search engine’s (okay, Google) results with no extra work on my part. So I can run with whatever works best. It’s a little too early to be issuing “challenges” to compare search results side by side, in my opinion, because Mahalo’s human editors haven’t created enough material, yet. You often get pretty crazy results that are way off the mark.

All Curries are not Equal

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that the results will improve as more human-edited pages come online, but I hope they’ll consider improving the algorithm that looks for keyword matches in Follow. I did a search for “how to make curry” and got ridiculous results in Follow that really baffled me, since Mahalo’s so big on “how to” pages and yet the phrase “how to” and “curry” came up with nothing relevant. Simplifying the search to just the word “curry” did the trick and I got good, relevant results in Follow. Once again, searching for a more accurate phrase gives me less accurate results. I hope this improves. Mahalo and conventional algorithmic search needs to work well for both power searchers as well as average folks tossing in one-word search terms.

Is Mahalo Worth It?

I would say that downloading Mahalo Follow is worth it, because it doesn’t involve any extra work for me to take advantage of it. It’s more of an effort for me to deliberately think to search Mahalo, even though that’s also been made easier by including it in my list of search providers for Firefox’s built-in search. But hey, try it out for yourself and judge for yourself. You can always uninstall it from Firefox if you don’t like it. But I will give it an extended tryout and see if it really cuts through the Google search results pages “noise” and provides more relevant results for my precious time and effort.