September 5, 2007 at 2:56 pm · Filed under News, Search Engines
I was browsing Mahalo on this sunny afternoon in an attempt to find information on credit cards (curiously I found nothing) and found what looks to be the first reported SPAM in Mahalo.
On the Jesus in Food page, constructed by Mahalo veteran Jonathan I found the following link:
GoldenPalace.com: Put your face on a grilled cheese WARNING: Pop-Ups
The subsequent website you are taken to when clicking the Golden Palace link has no content relating to Jesus in Food nor does it spawn pop ups in FF or IE6 (as Mahalo warned me it would).
What’s the deal? I thought the Mahalo approach was SPAM proof? Did Golden Palace put up content and then pull the ol’ bait and switch with the editors at Mahalo?
I registered with the site and reported it in the Message Board.
August 16, 2007 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Editorials, News, Search Engines
No offense Allen but you’re just plain wrong here. Yes Mahalo doesn’t pick up “new” news as quickly as automated bots, again just like Alexa as long as you understand how the data is collected this shouldn’t be a surprise.
The important question here is; Will the Skype outage of Thursday August 16th 2007 really go down as a “newsworthy” topic? One that would warrant a complete page on Mahalo?
The answer is No, of course not, the story barely belongs in Google’s index as I’m sure it’s already been resolved and 99.99998% of the population didn’t even notice.
As far as Mahalo using social news site to promote original articles I don’t really take issue with that, Jason will just need to be careful not to focus too much on that sort of social baiting. As you can see from Digg, most social communities tend to boil down the the least common denominator as the audience exands.
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 As nearly everyone online knows by now, Skype is out of commission. It’s down for the count. I was one of the first people to post about the Skype outage this morning, and since then, hundreds of others have as well. It’s a hot topic on Google Hot Trends (#45), and I am seeing 500 people an hour from my first page Google result.
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But where is the Mahalo page? The Mahalo Skype page has 3 headlines of which 2 are semi-outage related. Otherwise, searching for “Skype down” or “Skype outage” provides no result. Yet Google has indexed my page from 6AM and already shows it as one of the top pages.
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August 10, 2007 at 8:26 am · Filed under Google, Search Engines
TorrentFreak has the story on Google censoring torrent search results. It’s nothing new, as Google has been removing results for years on the requsts of various media companies like the RIAA/MPAA etc.
Which brings me to my call for an open source, offshore (possibly) search engine that allows the community to determine what gets censored.
Google Filters Torrents From Search Results
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Google has been filtering its search results for years. That’s proven very useful for the Chinese government, and of course content owner representatives like the MPAA and RIAA. According to Google, the filtering of torrents from the search results is a response to the DMCA complaints they receive.
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So, apparently one day Google decided that it is illegal in nearly every country of the world to host a .torrent file that (allegedly) links to infringing material. Strange, because there is no legal precedent for this decision in most countries.
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The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:
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August 9, 2007 at 8:22 am · Filed under Google, Search Engines
Everyone is up in arms lately about Google’s TOS and search robot lockout. People point to the hypocrisy of the situation citing that Google relies on ‘openness” from other web properties for it’s news service.
Everyone in the blogosphere needs to get over it, and realize that Google is a typical competitive corporate establishment that doesn’t always “do the right thing” and will aggressively look to protect and grow their business model.
Why do you think they are crusading against paid links? ( Ad Words anyone)
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One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.
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Google crawls news sites and grabs their content for republishing on Google News. They rely on the willingness of those news sites to get distribution on Google. But Google restricts others from crawling Google News itself via their robots.txt file and terms of use, which state that “you may not…use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the [Google News] Service.”
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August 8, 2007 at 8:14 am · Filed under Search Engines, Social, Web 2.0
The social search scene is great and all, and I’m sure there’s a market there but I’m also sure there’s lots of people who DON’T want to show up in Spock’s results.
What is the “opt out” feature like?
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People search engine Spock launches
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 Spock, the Redwood City, Calif. search engine for people, launches tomorrow after a year of suspense.
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We asked chief exec Jaideep Singh how he plans to make money. He said the company will serve ads next to searches just like Google does, though it will wait a few months before doing so.
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August 7, 2007 at 8:58 am · Filed under SEO, Search Engines
I clipped this post from Matt because yesterday I had my own “zoinks” moment when I noticed that within a couple hours (could be less) I was not only in Google’s index for ‘feedbuddy.de’ but had gotten traffic from it as well.
Google was returning the home page in the results but I’m sure the individual post page was not far behind.
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The Google crawl/indexing team has continued working hard, and several people have noticed Google’s index getting fresher and fresher. Now some documents can show up in minutes instead of hours or days.
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I’ve noticed that as search engines have gotter better (fresher, bigger, more relevant), people keep adjusting their expectations upwards. I can’t imagine waiting over a month for search engines to update their index with news events any more, but just a few years ago that’s how things worked. And it only takes a few encounters with a fresh index until you ratchet up your expectations. My previous mental model was “normally it takes a day or so to show up in many search engines,” but I had my own “Zoiks! That’s fast!” experience tonight, which I’ll describe for you.
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July 26, 2007 at 8:45 am · Filed under Search Engines
I’ll have to admit, when I first heard about Mahalo courtesy of Jason Calacanis’ blog, I was a bit skeptical and mentally put Mahalo low on my list of launches to be excited about. While the idea of a “human powered search engine” has always been intriguing to everyone in the tech industry due to the amount of SPAM and SEO exploitation in Google/Yahoo!/MSN, this latest execution stunk a little of pre-Web 2.0 bubble bursting material.
Fast forward a few months (the Alpha for Mahalo was released in May 2007) and while researching and composing an article on car insurance, I ended up at Mahalo to see the types of results I would get. The positive experience (the results were MUCH better than Google’s) was so interesting, I added some praise to the article for Mahalo and began to think that Mahalo may be a better search site for terms like “car insurance” where consumer education and research is just as important as the commercial vendors.
Which brings me to this article about popular search terms and Mahalo. The first issue I had to tackle was Mahalo’s lack of support for “adult themed” searches (read Jason’s comments on the topic). Searches for very common and broad keywords like “sex” and “ass” turned up absolutely nothing which means the popular keyword list is cut almost in half. This obviously is a very popular market that Mahalo is skirting around and I can see the reasoning behind it, although they are leaving out a huge opportunity in doing so. A more savvy strategy would be to embrace the adult market and provide the appropriate safe guards (something Google is unable or unwilling to do).
My focus then for this article is going to be other terms in the top 300 surge report I get weekly from WordTracker. This report shows the top 200 most commonly searched for phrases in the last 48 hours.
These searches represent non adult terms in the 300-250 most popular range.
1. Term: three days grace Result: Nothing
The grade would be lower but it seems this is a newish band and on the “surge” list for a reason.
Grade D
2. Term: expedia Result: Good
Full custom results, with information and links about the company and competitors.
Grade A
3. Term: short haircut Result: Nothing
Apparently people like to research new hairdos online, unfortunately Mahalo doesn’t help them in this regard.
Grade D-
4. Term: bank of america Result: Good
Good coverage like Expedia, except even more robust with a financial graph and more links.
Grade A+
5. Term: music Result: Okay
This results was interesting, instead of a typical results page I got a huge list of sub categories with breakdowns for each genre. Still, there’s no other content besides this.
Grade B-
6. Term: game boy cheats Result: Nothing
Amazing no one has gotten on this term already, gaming is one of the largest uses of the Internet and it’s keyword variations dominate search phrase inventories.
Grade F
7. Term: meaning of names Result: Nothing
Another common search engine term, people love looking up name “meanings”
Grade F
8. Term: bratz Result: Good
Good results, plenty of information links.
Grade A+
9. Term: linux Result: Good
Another home run, the Linux results are plentiful and quality.
Grade A+
10. Term: free online games Result: Nothing
Another gaming related keyword with no results, I’ll skip the future gaming keywords as I don’t expect results.
Grade F
11. Term: google earth Result: Nothing
Nothing from Mahalo Although the default Google results are just what people will need.
Grade C
12. Term: sunrocket Result: Nothing
This was a little surprising (as they’ve been around since 2004) but I’ll grade it fair as it appears sunrocket is new to the list.
Grade C-
13. Term: pictures of cats Result: Nothing
If I had a grade lower than F- I would hand it out here. Come on… no results for pictures of cats?!?! Shame.
Grade F-
14. Term: wwe Result: Good
Good results, plenty of information about this popular sport/attraction.
Grade A+
15. Term: bleach Result: Good
Surprisingly good results for such a boring term.
Grade A
16. Term: daniel radcliffe Result: Good
Another hit for Mahalo, the results are great here.
Grade A+
17. Term: vida guerra Result: Nothing
Vida is borderline “adult” material as she’s famous for mostly her body part(s). But I would expect to see some results as she’s managed to exploit her initial Internet celebrity into a somewhat legit career. Curiously “paris hilton” has good results and one could argue she’s more of an “adult” star then anything else.
Grade B-
18. Term: metallica Result: Good
Ah yes, the original RIAA piracy poster boys enjoy good results at Mahalo.
Grade A+
19. Term: dog Result: Good
The results are very complete and offer many categories of links and information for dog lovers and researchers as well as consumers.
Grade A+
Final Conclusion:
The final verdict is a bit mixed. There are plenty of A’s on the report card above but also plenty of F’s. All of which shows that the staff at Mahalo still has a lot of work to do. If Jim Lanzone is to be believed and 60% of all searches are unique and new, Mahalo might have a never ending battle ahead of them that they cannot win.
However, if Mahalo positions themselves as Wikipedia for search and the web community embraces them (and contributes) they could be one of the late Web 2.0 success stories.
April 5, 2007 at 2:16 pm · Filed under Search Engines
A colleague of mine Michael McGrath recently published an article at WebWordManMusings.com on the topic of SEO as it relates to copy. He crafted a Top 10 list of DO’s and then a list of 5 DON’T’s. It’s a good read for online business owners and operators, and covers some basic fundamentals in SEO that will only help your rank (no black hat stuff here)
When it comes to doing and not doing with web copy writing, 11 is a little limiting in the Do column, and 5 is far too short in the Don’t column, but for purposes of this quick little hit, they’ll suffice. The point of web copy writing is to optimize a home page for search engine indexing. There is something of a paradox at work, and it does require a balancing act of sorts - - - you’re writing for the search engines as your first audience; but, the search engines want you to be writing for your human audience.
The thought to have as you write for your site, I suggest, is this: if your copy serves your human audience well with its clarity on and accuracy with keyword use, and you keep it refreshed often enough to show your human audience respect, you’ll score well with the robots.
So, here’s a workable list of DO’s for your web site home page:
1. Word count. 400 to 700 words, total, including navigation menu (which should be text, not an image)…
Read more…
If you liked the article give it a Digg.
