I read about a new search engine called Mahalo ("thank you" in Hawaiian) in Fast Company.
Is it using some fancy algorithm to beat Google or more powerful servers to power
the search? No. Mahalo uses people to do the searching. At first it seems kind of web -1.0
but perhaps there is something to it. After all people are much harder to be
fooled by spammers. And people are still better at computers figuring out
what search results are really useful. Does getting 100,000,000 search results
really help me or do I want just one page of personally honed results?
Mahalo staff pre-write responses to the most popular search terms. They
only target the top 30%, or about 15,000 terms. The rest get refered back
to Google. Mahalo will be a search engine for people who don't like to
search. Maybe this is Web 3.0. Hmmm.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/man-vs-machine.html
When I first heard about this, I wondered how this is different from the original Yahoo search engine (people powered), or the Open Directory project (http://dmoz.org/) which powers Google's directory search, both of which have been around for a LONG time, and neither of which are very effective. But maybe this is somehow different from those early efforts? I dunno...
