rotten bananas

The infamous Jason Calacanis (of Mahalo, Netscape.com, Weblogs, Inc.) commented on my previous Mahalo post. I feel slightly important now.

My Response:

Mahalo is just looking to fill the top 10,000 search terms or whatever. Obviously this will give them exposure within the most profitable areas, as Jason said, but, there are two issues I have with this. Firstly, getting a chunk of the market away from Google (or Yahoo, MSN, etc.) is going to be damn near impossible. So, while clicks on the first page results of a Google search on ‘personal finance’ may pay off well, the same on Mahalo will bring in such a tiny audience that a ‘top search term’ will still be worth very little. Also, I have to note that Mahalo’s primary revenue stream is Adsense, which directly profits its largest competitor.

I’m not saying that Mahalo can’t be successful. It could take off, but I can’t help but feel that having humans do any job currently done by a machine is a bit of a step back. It’s almost prehistoric. Yea, the results are generally more relevant on Mahalo, and the most sought-after links are listed first, but the limitations suck.

New buzz words will have to be manually added to search results while Google will be indexing it left and right. Plus, when something first appears how can one decide which sites are most appropriate for the results page? Will Mahalo have to wait for a leader to emerge before providing links?

How about the constant maintenance of established search results? Things change… often. Market leaders shift; technology evolves; disasters happen; links die. How is Mahalo going to keep up with these alterations? Are employees going to have to review all established search results on a regular basis to check for dead links?

I’d like to add a note about SEOs bashing Mahalo. Sure, SEOs may have trouble getting results onto Mahalo, but that won’t matter when 99.9% of searches are performed through other engines. My guess is that SEOs are enthusiastic about Calacanis’ failure for other reasons.

There may be a number of big names with deep pockets behind the project, but that doesn’t speak to its legitimacy. It’s a lot easier to get those names behind you when you’re Jason Calacanis. I’d like to see how the would have responded to the pitch from Adam Ferguson. And besides, if you ask someone about the top 10 mistakes of all time, odds are 9 of them were made by someone with a big name and deep pockets.