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A Few Mahalo Updates and Questions
This discussion is about four topics related to Mahalo (and the general Internet):
- Is Mahalo a clone of Hakia Gallery?
- Corporate social tool usage
- Where does Mahalo get their high Alexa ranking from?
- Positive employee feedback and encouragement from management
Mahalo: A Hakia Clone?
Last week I met with semantic search engine Hakia. One of the features they demo’ed to me is the "Hakia Gallery". The Gallery is a partially human-edited results for over several thousand results. The immediate reaction I had was "Is Mahalo a Hakia clone?" – do a search for cancer on both Hakia and Mahalo to see an example. Mahalo probably wins a point on design but gives up multiple points as the Hakia Gallery uses some human and some computer to create a much more robust page. So is Mahalo a clone? We already know that Jason knows how to clone… see Netscape.
Update: Based on my offline emails with Jason regarding this section, here is my clarification. I am in no way suggesting that Mahalo lifted any design elements from Hakia. I am merely noting that the pages are similar. I think Mahalo’s design is easier on the eyes and Hakia’s technology appears better by combining human-edited results plus their search technology. Also, please note that the link to Netscape being a Digg clone goes to TechCrunch.
Mahalo’s social media usage
One of the ways Mahalo is getting traffic is by leveraging their employees and contractors to submit and vote up stories on the social media sites. Here is an example post on the news group:
When I first came across this, I was completely outraged. How could a CEO ask his or her employees to digg, reddit, stumble, scape a story to get it on the front page. It’s one thing to ask some buddies to help out with a digg, but for a corporation to ask their employees to do this, just seemed wrong, very wrong.
I decided to hold off posting about this as I wanted to really think about it. And here is the conclusion I came to. It’s ok in moderation. I guess there is no difference to this type of cheerleading as if Ford asked their employees to pass out Ford info as they walk in a park. Jason isn’t forcing the employees to vote, nor is he asking for positive votes. As Mahalo grows in number of employees/contractors, we will see more Mahalo stories hit the front page. I do wonder, if the social sites were all "corporate run" would the largest corporations always make the front page of x site?
Investigating Mahalo’s Alexa ranking
Jason has touted his Alexa ranking (for whatever its worth, which is basically nil) all over the Internet, mostly at Valleywag. And currently Mahalo sits at a rank of 5,267 for the 3-month average and an awesome 3,256 for last week. I decided to put on my Columbo analytics hat and have a look deeper (ok, only as deep as Alexa goes!). Here is the chart of number of pageviews and what parts of the Mahalo site are generating the traffic:
Ten pageviews per visitor – who wouldn’t love that! And then we see where the traffic is coming from. Almost half of the traffic is to internal, non-public sections of Mahalo. Greenhouse is the section of the site where the "guides" work on creating the pages that appear on Mahalo. And this means that at least a portion of the guides are using the Alexa toolbar. When you enter the Greenhouse, you search for the terms that you might want to write a results-page for. But it might take you 20 searches to find a page that isn’t created already. Hence the 9.8 pageviews per visitor!
Now back to that 5,267 ranking. Since we know that ~50% of the traffic is to internal sections and we know that the majority of views are from guides, we can apply this to the other ~50 of the traffic that is going to the main Mahalo.com site. In essence, the majority of the traffic to Mahalo is actually internal, employee traffic! I wonder what their ranking would be if this was removed. My HP10B++ estimates it to be in the 60-80k range.
Jason is smart, very smart. Get your employees to use a publicly available tool and over time, as you increase employees, you increase monetizable page views. Even if it’s not on his radar today, it should be. Imagine if you had 1 million page views, and your employees added another 3 million creating pages to support the other 1 million. To the average Internet marketer (i.e. most of the ones I have dealt with), that’s 4 million page views to buy/sell! Genius!
Employee Encouragement
The last part of this conversation is around employee encouragement and feedback. Jason has done a great job here. Since Jason is so public online, it’s easy to tell when he is having a bad day. I have watched him throw a fit on x person or y site and just a few minutes later congratulate the guides on Mahalo. It’s so critical to give your employees the encouragement they need to be satisfied. Writing search pages is probably about as boring (most times) as watching paint dry.
But if you can get people excited about the work they are doing, they will feel better about it. I hope this post encourages Jason to talk about employee encouragement in the Web worker field. I have managed teams for years now and it’s easy to walk over to someone’s desk and tell them how great a job they did. But online where your workers are spread out, it’s not as easy. Might be a great niche there for someone to blog about!
Well duh, all those people updating all those pages at Mahalo have the Alexa toolbar installed. There’s a big shock. Not.
To compare Mahalo in any way to Hakia is entertaining, they couldn’t be more different.
Michael – if 50% of the rank is coming from the Mahalo intranet, then it does lend to the 9.8 pageviews per visitor.
As a Mahalo Guide, I just wanted to comment on your statement about how Greenhouse guides at Mahalo must sign in and search for search terms.
“When you enter the Greenhouse, you search for the terms that you might want to write a results-page for. But it might take you 20 searches to find a page that isn’t created already. Hence the 9.8 pageviews per visitor”
This is actually not the case… guides login and access a page that shows us the most wanted search engine result pages (SeRPs). If a serp is already taken, it is shown in green, and all of those serps that are still available are shown in red.
We already know off the bat if a search result is taken or not, so that’s not exactly the real culprit behind the 9.8 pageviews per visitor.
The Greenhouse data is interesting but FWIW those aren’t all private pages. I have nothing to do with Mahalo and just browsed several.
1. All sites have people working on them. Google, Yahoo, etc. have tens of thousands of employees working on their sites. Wikipedia’s traffic is probably 50% people editing it. Who cares? It’s really not a big deal. At Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker I’m sure bloggers load their pages over and over again….. it’s par for the course.
2. I’ve been saying Alexa is a joke for five years. I could care less about Alexa rankings… Web 2.0 companies with 50k pages views rank above sites with 2M on Alexa all the time. It’s a joke, it doesn’t matter, and we should all just move on. If you want to game Alexa just hire 20 people to load 10 of your pages a day, reboot their routers once and a while, and you’ll look huge.
3. Grouping links into related sections was not a Hakia invention… folks have been doing that forever. Really don’t appreciate you calling me a thief dude. The design of Mahalo was done by Jon Hicks who is–for my money–one of the best in the business. He did Firefox and Wordpress/Automatic media. Hakia is only similar to us in that we, like Clusty, group results. Yahoo directory, DMOZ/ODP, and dozens of other directories from the early days did the same exact thing…. grouped links. Give me a break.
4. Folks have been asking folks to bookmark/digg their stories all time as well… in fact, folks post to their blogs all the time saying “digg this!” We all get emails/IMs from folks asking for a digg. So, I agree… doing it all the time is not cool, but doing it when you have something great is just fine. As long as you don’t use robots/sock puppets I think it’s cool. If you look at digg, delicious, reddit, etc. almost every story is the result of groups of like minded folks who vote. That’s the nature of these groups. If you want to participate you really need to have the support of 10-20 people. I don’t think there is any way to change this… it’s just the way it is. At the end of the day the save guard is the fact that spam gets removed/buried/sunk. So, as long as it’s amazing content it’s fine to ask for votes from what I understand.
5. Regarding keeping people excited it’s really not that hard when it comes to a project like Mahalo. Every day we have folks thank us for helping them with our How To articles and for our super clean search results. I would be taking far to much credit if I were to say I was motivating them… helping other people is a built in motivation we all have.
j
All sites have people working on them. Google, Yahoo, etc. have tens of thousands of employees working on their sites. Wikipedia’s traffic is probably 50% people editing it. Who cares? It’s really not a big deal. At Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker I’m sure bloggers load their pages over and over again….. it’s par for the course.
50% of wikipedia’s traffic is people making edits? Are you out of your mind? According to wikipedia’s own recent changes page, there was about 115 edits in the last 1 minute. I’m pretty sure that one of the top 20 sites on the internet receives more than 230 page loads per minute… oh wait, I know so. I work for one of them.
It may be true on your own blog and on Mahalo, but not on heavily trafficked websites.
I’ve been saying Alexa is a joke for five years. I could care less about Alexa rankings… Web 2.0 companies with 50k pages views rank above sites with 2M on Alexa all the time. It’s a joke, it doesn’t matter, and we should all just move on. If you want to game Alexa just hire 20 people to load 10 of your pages a day, reboot their routers once and a while, and you’ll look huge.
Well, crown you a king. Everyone has been saying alexa is a joke for five years.
So, if your employees aren’t using Alexa, who is hitting the greenhouse 37% of the time? If they’re not, then it doesn’t say much at *all* about the readership of Mahalo. If 37% of your hits on alexa (people using the toolbar) are hitting the greenhouse, that must mean next to no one is reading the damn site. Care to publish some stats for us?
Grouping links into related sections was not a Hakia invention… folks have been doing that forever. Really don’t appreciate you calling me a thief dude.
A title well earned, Jason. Would you deny Netscape was heavily inspired by digg?
The design of Mahalo was done by Jon Hicks who is–for my money–one of the best in the business. He did Firefox and Wordpress/Automatic media.
I agree, Hicks is one hell of a designer.
Hakia is only similar to us in that we, like Clusty, group results. Yahoo directory, DMOZ/ODP, and dozens of other directories from the early days did the same exact thing…. grouped links. Give me a break.
I would tend to agree, your design isn’t very original in this context. Theres only so many ways to accomplish it.
So, as long as it’s amazing content it’s fine to ask for votes from what I understand.
Dude, shut up with the PR/Marketing talk already… everywhere you go you slip in ego-buffing words like that. News flash: Mahalo sucks, and is all the hype you could produce. I even wrote a nice little article about the hype behind it.
Regarding keeping people excited it’s really not that hard when it comes to a project like Mahalo.
Wow… human powered search results. A wasted idea with persuaded results that also failed in the first bubble. Are you gonna jump ship like you did to netscape when the results weren’t what you had hoped for?
Every day we have folks thank us for helping them with our How To articles and for our super clean search results.
Can you go just one sentence please, without the marketing speak?
I would be taking far to much credit if I were to say I was motivating them… helping other people is a built in motivation we all have.
You take far too much credit, as is. Take credit for the good, abandon the bad and let someone else take the fall. Classic you, ain’t it? ;)
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Wacky Labs — This is supposed to look like a sig!