SEO UPDATES

I came across an interesting search engine the other day which appears to be heading in a completely different direction to practically anything else available at present. As you probably know, search engines function by using crawlers that search the Internet endlessly picking up new and revised content and then cataloguing the whole lot neatly in a central database. When a user types in a phrase, the search engine refers to this database and, by using a number of algorithms, returns the sites that it feels most appropriate.

The relatively new search engine Mahalo (Hawaiian for ‘Thank-You’) puts a spin on proceedings by pitching itself as a human powered search engine. Of course this doesn’t mean that whenever you perform a search that humans immediately start searching the net for relevant material, but rather that contributors create their own results pages which are then returned when a specific search is performed. The idea verges on the ridiculous but does certainly hold some merit.

The downside of course being humans simply can’t possibly work as fast as the crawlers that traditional search engines like Google use; the machines running these crawlers are online all day every day and can make note of every detail on a whole website in a matter of seconds. A human based search engine is always going to be comparatively out of date and limited in terms the amount of material that can be catalogued.

There are however advantages to a human based search engine but these can only be truly appreciated by using it. Head to www.mahalo.com and type in a phrase that is of interest to you – I remained topical and typed in ‘Gordon Brown’ since he appears to be hitting the headlines a fair bit at the moment. Mahalo immediately returned to me a quick overview on the man, a photo, twelve fast facts and a large number of vetted websites with useful information which have been split in to a number of useful categories such as ‘recent news’, ‘Brown Blair Changeover’ and ‘Controversies’. In contrast, if you type the same in to Google it immediately returns 13,000,000 results for pages which mention the words Gordon or Brown; of course the most relevant sites are at the top but it still is a little more cumbersome to navigate.

It is also fairly safe to say that humans are better equipped to work out what other humans will find interesting and as such you won’t find links to any pages that contain adult content, hate speech, spam, intrusive advertising, malicious material and even sites written with a poor grasp of the English language.

The quantity of content available is rather unimpressive at present; of my native Paignton gave no results as did the entire county of Devon (rather worryingly). However as the site is just over a year old and there is much information to be catalogued and work to be done. I fear that unless there is a serious amount of manpower that any existing results could also soon become stale and irrelevant.

In all honesty Mahalo will never a competitor to Google or the bigger engines in terms of the sheer quantity of results but to make a direct comparison between the two against each other would be missing the point. Mahalo isn’t trying to be Google; it is a humanly edited search engine which is being built to provide applicable, human picked material for popular subjects. Google on the other hand is a vast machine driven database of over 100,000,000 websites which is added to every second of every day. They both have their purpose, and as such I would certainly hope that there is room for them both to peacefully co-exist online.