Jason Calcanis officially launched his “people-powered search engine,” Mahalo, yesterday.

“Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.”

Mahalo’s press release features a Q&A section, wherein it outlines the differences between the company’s business model/processes and those of some other “comparable” companies, including About.com, DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and Wikipedia. Interestingly enough, there’s no mention of the company that, in my mind, most closely resembles Mahalo – Ask Jeeves.

I worked at AJ from 1998-2002, during which time we employed over 100 human editors. Those editors – who, btw, were all well-versed in their assigned vertical categories – were responsible for hand-selecting the best answers to the site’s most frequently asked questions on an ongoing basis. The thought was that 80% of the people asked the same 20% questions all the time. By using humans to direct users to sites that most effectively answered each question, we’d be able to ensure the web’s most relevant search experience.

Needless to say, Jeeves’ original business model failed for a variety of reasons and I suspect that, based on Mahalo’s processes as they exist today, the new engine will likely suffer a similar fate. Here’s why:

• Content is being created at way too fast a place to ensure that the “best” answers today will be the best answers tomorrow. Given the recent explosion in CGM, etc, this is a far bigger issue today than it was seven or eight years ago. It’s unrealistic to expect that Mahalo’s Guides will reassess the search results they’ve created on a regular basis.
• The company is only as scaleable as the number of people it can hire (i.e. there’s little to no technology leverage). The more successful Mahalo becomes (as defined by the number of queries it receives), the more content it will need to create. The more content it needs to create, the more people they’ll need to hire. As Danny Sullivan notes in his post on Mahalo,
  

  “Ask’s problem was scaling. Having so many editors cost money. In contrast, Google’s link-based automated approach provided good relevancy for both popular and unusual (or long-tail) queries. Over time, the machine has reigned supreme when it comes to the major search engines. Yahoo’s human-powered directory has been buried in various ways over the years, while Microsoft once heavy-reliance on human editing of top results was long-abandoned in the technological chase after Google.”

  Granted, Calcanis admits that Mahalo is not intended to be a “google killer”. But even in competition for a single percent of search market share, I think they’ll run into problems competing with algorithmic-based search engines. It’s no coincidence that Ask’s new ad campaign claims, “The Algorithm Killed Jeeves”.

• Yesterday, Calcanis asked, “Why not build a Reuters or AP organization to handle 24 percent of searches.” Why? Because winning – or even competing – in the search game isn’t about finding the best answers to the 20% of most frequently asked questions — the difference lies in each engine’s ability to find the most relevant answers for the remaining 80%. Google recognized that from day one, which is one of the many reasons why they’ve come out on top.

Calcanis understands Mahalo’s scalability issues and has decided to backfill long-tail searches with results from Google. This certainly provides a better overall user experience, but once again history would suggest that it won’t go far enough. Ask Jeeves tried backfilling results from engines including About.com, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, and Webcrawler, Direct Hit, and finally Teoma. The problem was, backfilled results were always treated secondary to any possible human-edited match, which meant that the most relevant answers were often buried in the back pages of search engine results.

Not long after acquiring Teoma, Ask dropped its “human” element and decided instead to feature only algorithmic search results. If Mahalo continues to lean heavily on the human-powered model, I predict it will eventually come to the same realization that Ask made in 2002. Especially with the emergence of image, video, audio, and user-generated content, Mahalo will have an extremely hard time maintaining relevancy. Though Mahalo might reach a balancing point between ad revenue and operational costs, I predict that it will never generate a loyal user base that extends far beyond Calcanis’ circle of friends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under Ask.com, Featured Item, Search: Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.