Trusting Human-Powered Search

Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 2:22am

Jason Calacanis today writes that Mahalo's challenge is breadth rather than depth. Fair enough, but to me currency, and by extension accuracy, are of even greater importance for their sustainability. In search, accuracy = trust = user retention1. Google's trust model is based on a broad acceptance that their crawlers do a good job of finding pages and that their indexers and ranking algorithms are likely to lead you to the most relevant results for a given search. Certainly there are flaws in the model and room for improvement, from which the category (of one?) of human-powered search draws its raison d'être, but ...

Mahalo’s Untapped Opportunity

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 5:15pm

I've been watching the early progress of Mahalo, the new “human powered” search engine launched by Jason Calacanis last month, more than I normally would a search-related startup in no small part because I'm impressed with and fascinated by the type and intensity of buzz Jason's been able to create around it with so little cash outlay. As I spend more time considering the basic model of identifying and gathering the most interesting/relevant/current/popular/uniquely useful/etc. sites related to popular searches, I can't help but think of just how important context is to search, and that while Mahalo's broad-based approach to adoption may be ...