Google vs. Mahalo: The Top 10
I’ve been watching the reaction to Mahalo ever since I discovered the search engine a few weeks ago. While Live Search alters it’s algorithm to compete with Google, Mahalo is not using one at all. Instead Mahalo uses human guides to build search engine results pages. The objective is the same: weed through all the crap and serve up the most relevant links. However, using human power to generate search results is extremely time consuming. So, Mahalo’s strategy is to inject themselves into the top 30% of the search market, compiling the top 10,000 or so keywords first.
At least, that was the goal. They’ve actually reached 10,000 results pages and are now shooting for 20,000. Using stay-at-home workers as “part-time guides”, they are leveraging the power of the Internet to exponentially grow their resources and their results. So, how do they compare against Google? Well, let’s just take a quick look at the top 10 searched pages on Mahalo vs. the Google’s top 10 trends from yesterday (10/3/07) and you be the judge.
Mahalo’s Top 50: |
Google Trend’s Top 50: |
Is it anywhere near close? I didn’t think so either. I think this little demonstration shows quite clearly what the challenges are for a human powered search engine like Mahalo. Keeping up and staying relevant in an ever-changing flow of keyword terms is a tough challenge for anyone, or anything. This is just round one … let’s see how things pan out and who will win in round two. What is round two? Traffic … let’s see if Mahalo can make a big enough impact to garner some real traffic …
October 4th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
actually, it’s more about how we rank for certain keywords over others… we have a bunch of the other pages (in fact, most). it’s just that for Halo we got a lot of good pages an the Halo community is sharing/bookmarking our stuff.
the top list on Mahalo is for PAGES LOADED not searches….
October 5th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Jason,
Thanks for visiting the blog! I see you are taking a real, sincere interest in the public’s view of Mahalo. That is very encouraging. I do stand corrected on what the Top 10 is actually reporting. I also checked, and you are correct. Mahalo does have entries for 7 out of 10 of the Google top 10.
This isn’t a bad showing, based on these facts. Since you brought it up, I’m curious how much of the site’s traffic is coming from the social networking sites? Do you forsee social networking as potentially the real drivers of traffic in the wake of Web 2.0?
Just some thoughts. I hope you return to answer …