To compare Mahalo in any way to Hakia is entertaining, they couldn’t be more different.

“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.

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

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!