[Search-l] _Mahalo_ and co-opting Wikia Search

[Seth Finkelstein]

[The following is from Danny Sullivan's article on the Mahalo launch]

Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
http://searchengineland.com/070530-180000.php

What if Maholo somehow beat all the odds and seriously threatened
Google? Doesn't that potentially weaken Mahalo, which is depending on
Google to do the hard work of crawling the web and providing relevant
results for all those tail terms that Mahalo won't target?

Calacanis sees this as unlikely -- but that's also where Search Wikia
-- project backed by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales -- might come in. Wales
is focused more on building an open-source crawling of the web that
anyone could use (see Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia for more on
this). For that reason, Calacanis doesn't necessarily see himself as
"beating" Wales to the punch with a new human-powered service and in
fact sees the two projects as perhaps complimentary.

"If his open source results are good and unique and better than
Google's, we'll use them. We're defaulting to Google for long tail
[query results] because they are the best search out there. I hope
that he comes up with something great, because if it is open source,
we'd have a great solution," Calacanis said.

[end excerpt from Danny Sullivan's article on the Mahalo Launch]

	I know, Jason Calacanis also said the same thing on this list,
but I cite the above to note that search experts are also considering
the issue now. To me, the most significant of Calacanis' past stances
is not the SEO-is-dead stuff. That's just fluff, the sort of thing
they can do because A-listers have the privilege that whatever they
happen to rant about, gets *heard*. It's like a radio talk-show host.
People can attach entirely too much import to the day's show fodder.

	Rather, unremarked here, the put-ads-on-Wikipedia position is
what I believe is most relevant. It's difficult to get hard data on
these sorts of business propositions. It exists somewhere, but it's
surrounded by a bodyguard of hypes. But it's a complicated matter as
to how much one can build a product out of technology vs. marketing
and social networks. For example, _Wikipedia_ is not much in terms of
technology - it's almost all network effect. While Google gained a
dominant position through better technology, that technology has been
duplicated by Yahoo and Microsoft, but it's not doing them any good.

	Frankly, I shouldn't try to predict where any attempt to co-opt
Wikia Search would end up, I'm way out of my area of expertise here.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com/
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php