Talk:Mahalo.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Mahalo.com article.
Article policies
A fact from Mahalo.com appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 8 June 2007.
Wikipedia


Contents

[edit] Arbitrary section header

I think that a Wikipedia page on Mahalo would be appropriate considering Mahalo.com is a notable company lead by a group of notable investors and executives including News Corporation, Sequoia Capital, CBS, Elon Musk, and myself Jason Calacanis. JasonCalacanis 21:06, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Mollyfud 21:41, 3 June 2007 (UTC) Can't agree. Give it a week at least. And is it good that the owner of the site is asking for the page to be created?

Lots of people ask for pages to be created, Google news seems to indicate a fair number of articles. Now, where is the fun in letting things wait when you are watching the Wikipedia News Network :o -- Tawker 22:14, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Jason, you might want to post a list of news appearances with link here to make it easy for other editors to create an article. Please don't send any sock puppets or meat puppets to do the editing. There seem to be some interested neutrals who will add the material for you. It doesn't matter how many notable investors you have, Wikipedia articles require independent sources of information. That's the criteria, not capital. That said, there seems to be plenty of news coverage. Jehochman Talk 22:54, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Would never do sock/meat puppet thing. Would never break COI. Here is a list of Mahalo's Press Coverage for you. Note: it includes the good and the bad. Many SEOs are attacking the concept of human-based search results for obvious reasons (i.e. it puts them out of business). Leave it up to you guys if that part should be included.JasonCalacanis 23:16, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm not attacking the Mahalo concept. In fact, I'm one of the few SEOs working on Wikipedia, and no, I don't think you will put any SEOs out of business. On the contrary, human edited directories open up whole new avenues for link baiting, Wiki-baiting and Mahalo-baiting. Did you happen to show up for SMX in Seattle tonight? I am here, and this will be the buzz at the bar. Jehochman Talk 23:25, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
I don't think anyone will be able to bait/trick Mahalo's Guides. The only way to get on our pages is the quality of your site. That being said, I'm sure folks will try. I was going to speak at SMX, but Danny Sullivan couldn't make it work this time. I offered to come up and do a debate re: SEO and Mahalo but we couldn't make it happen. If you are in Los Angeles any time soon let me know! firstname@lastname dot com is my email. JasonCalacanis 23:41, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
They list 4 key people at www.mahalo.com/mahalo as Jason Calacanis: CEO, Elliot C.R. Cook: COO, Mark Jeffrey: CTO C.K. Sample III: Editorial Director
reset

Fixed names of C-level execs. Jehochman Talk 04:09, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

This page could use some updating, it talks in present tense about the rate of growth of Mahalo in 2007, for example. I'd edit myself but I wrote a search result for them once, and won one of their contests. While I think I'm neutral enough, others may disagree. LizBlankenship (talk) 23:31, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

If you are not acting at their direction as an employee or contractor, I for one would not consider that to be a conflict. If you would feel more comfortable, write what you wish and post it here on the talk page. Somebody else will add it to the article. Please provide references. A Firefox add-on is available that automatically generates citation wikicode from any web page. WPCITE.xpi, can be downloaded from Mozdev. To run the add-on, the user right-clicks and selects Wikipedia CITE. Jehochman Talk 03:01, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] List of Features

I deleted the list of features because that makes the article sound like an advertisement, which isn't what we want. Please comb through the references provided by Jason, and run some news searches. We need to gather facts from the news reports and assemble them to form an article. We don't want to start from the company website, because that will lead to a boring, biased article that nobody will want to read. We need to include all significant points of view. Mahalo is controversial, so we need to include any criticisms that have been reported by reliable sources. (This excludes somebody ranting on their personal blog.) Jehochman Talk 08:15, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I too felt the list of features was spammy. Jehochman: thanks for the quality buildout of the page. You've done a great job of describing the service with citations! 76.167.229.57 18:54, 4 June 2007 (UTC)


There is no such thing as a "human based search engine", this is a human edited DIRECTORY, that has stated it's goal as eventually making a profit from placing ads in its "search results". As it is not a search engine it can not provide "Search Results". This is SEO Marketing 101.

There is an error in the key people section. C.K. Sample III is only director-level, he does not seem to be a key person (& I don't think he is a founder?) The Mahalo corporate site lists three C-level execs at http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo who seem to be the right names

Was this really an error? C.K. Sample III is listed as part of the management team on the same page you reference regarding the C-level execs.

[edit] Competitors

I suggest we include chacha.com and sproose.com as competitors since they are doing human search. 67.159.166.18 21:47, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, that last note should have been from my account (jasoncalacanis, I'm the CEO of Mahalo). I forgot to login--forgive me! JasonCalacanis 21:48, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
Good idea. I need to find a source that says this. If you know of one, please post it here. Just so you know, since this article has been greatly expanded and is less than five days old, I am going to submit it to WP:DYK, which may place it on the home page of Wikipedia for a while. Jehochman Talk 00:23, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
This is really an amazing testament to the power of Wikipedia to be fair--and fast! I'm blown away by how detailed, fair, and accurate this is. Really is balanced and paints a very solid picture of what not only we're doing but where the space is heading (i.e. Matt Cutt's quote, ChaCha, Wikia, etc). Really great job everyone! JasonCalacanis 05:51, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Source

Somebody who has time, please check this source and update the article. Jehochman Talk 14:11, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Another. Jehochman Talk 22:02, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mahalo Greenhouse

We launched the Mahalo Greenhouse last week in London. This service allows users to write search results and make $10-15 for doing so. If folks don't want the fees they can donate the fees to the Wikipedia/WikiMediaFoundation. I think it merits a section on the page, but I of course leave that to the community to decide.76.167.229.57 01:31, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Persuasive text and Mahalo is not a search engine.

I'm not accusing Mahalo staff of doing this (as I can see from this talk page, Calacanis is being a good and fair Wikipedian) but maybe some of his fans aren't. There are several lines in this article that are simply there to pursuade the reader to use Mahalo. "Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan has called some of Mahalo's results "impressive". That is persuasive and yet is clearly not there to serve any information to the reader other than to express the POV of a individual of the search engine industry - this brings me on to point 2.

Mahalo is not a Search Engine . As defined by the Wikipedia article on search engines "Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider)". Sorry guys, it's a directory. Martin Porcheron talk to memy edits 23:01, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Updated it to remove the persuasive text on the page that caught my eye. Mahalo is not a standard search engine because it is not automated but it is because it uses queries and not directory listings. I've tried to explain this as clearly as possible in the article, but I'm a bit tired so it probably could be improved. Martin Porcheron talk to memy edits 23:11, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What kind of search engine is it?

There's a debate about the term Human Search Engine that has now spilled out into various specific search-engine pages. Mahalo.com calls itself a "human-powered search", which sounds like a reasonable self-explanatory description. Is there evidence that they (or WP:RS that write about them) use the specific and apparently technically-defined "Human Search Engine" terminology? DMacks (talk) 21:32, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

For the moment I would call it a web directory. What they hype themselves to be is human powered search engine. We go on what reliable sources say, not corporate press releases. - Jehochman Talk 21:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Taking a page from Wikipedia

I'm not sure if this is encyclopedic or not, but it's certainly interesting: They are taking a page from Wikipedia and allowing the general public to edit. It won't be a free-for-all like Wikipedia: Staff members will screen edits before they appear. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 14:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)