Are Google’s days numbered?
Make way for the new breed of search engines. Take Mahalo for instance which claims to be the world’s first human-powered search engine, and thus giving only highly relevant categorised results. Being human powered, would of course have implications on scale as Ask.com had discovered, but without doubt, this would be one way to cut through all the clutter that is filling up the Internet - try this search for [Paris Hilton] for example. A search for [Paris Hotels] throws up results of actual hotels rather than hotel aggregation sites. This ve
ry relevance is what makes scalability difficult. According to Google, in any given day, roughly 20% to 25% of its queries have never been submitted to it before. On the other hand, Jason Calacanis [read his blog] claims that the top 10,000 search terms account for 24 percent of all searches. Not designed to replace Google, Mahalo also includes results from Google.
Other search engines include Hakia which is attempting to automate what Mahalo does humanly, and Powerset which claims to be a Natural Search Engine. Still under development, they release a new search query on the Powerset blog every week.
Related reads:
Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
Start-Up Adds a Human Touch
Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo: Screw the long tail
Filed under: Digital culture, Ideas & Innovations, Trends
sorry pal this is the previous owner of wildblueskies, but mahola is crap…can’t search for nuts…just an opinion.
Don’t really think its meant to be a search engine like the ones we are currently used to such as Google. The scope of terms it would be able to cover is pretty limited, and for the rest, it simply provides results from Google.
However, it provides something that Google does not - and that is targeted results (even if they are currently for a very limited set of terms).
Mahalo also has a limitation because it is human powered. As a trend however, it is interesting, because these search engines are providing results that Google currently cannot because of the way that page Rank currently works. The rise of highly contextual search results I guess. Take a look at kartoo (www.kartoo.com) for instance.
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