Earlier this week The New York Times reported on several “man-made” search engines that are seeking to outwit the algorithms of Yahoo, and Google with manually edited results. One search engine in particular the article focused on is venture capitol backed Mahalo. Since the article spoke highly of their recently launched service I thought I would test the engine with searches for my upcoming trip to Costa Rica. However when I entered the keyword ‘Costa Rica’ I received the Mahalo message equivalent to a 404 that said, “Oops! We haven’t hand written a result page for Costa Rica yet.” In today’s impatient society, I doubt that this will encourage users to return to search another time. Furthermore, there were 4 results that Mahalo listed in Related Results Pages which appear to match that I’m looking for some sort of vacation, or any string of letters within my search term that include ‘rica.’ Sounds like an algorithm to me.

Further in the article Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis tested searches for “lingerie” and “low-carb diets” (among other terms) that produced spam-infested sites in bigger search engines. Besides the fact that certain high-volume terms are simply more likely to drive spammers, I saw quite a few similarities between Mahalo, Google, and Yahoo. Common results across at least 2 of the 3 engines included: Wikipedia, Fredericks of Hollywood, and Victoria ’s Secret. While Mahalo results yielded several other sites for lingerie not listed in the top rankings of Google and Yahoo, there was no indication as to why these sites performed so well after following Frederick’s of Hollywood and Vickie’s. Could this be the first attempt at Paid Natural Search?

I realize that the core question here is – will Google and other algorithm-based search engines always control the Internet? Who knows? However, it doesn’t appear that human-edited search engines are going to dominate market share in the immediate future. Until Mahalo can match a tenth of Google’s results I might suggest changing its name from the Hawaiian word for ‘Thank You,’ to Ho’opa’ani, the Hawaiian word for ‘joke.’

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 9:30 am by admin and is filed under Google, Mahalo, Natural Search (SEO), Paid Search (PPC), Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.