Hakia Archive

NY-based semantic search engine Hakia has announced the launch of what they are calling the, "Credible online health search." It appears to be a competitor to iMedix. Instead of showing the most popular results first, they are showing the ones that are the most credible. Hakia has published a list of the sources they deem credible. This is a step away from machine powered search and closer to human-based search.

Hakia describes the updates as, "To ensure credibility, hakia is providing results from sources that have met the quality criteria set forth by the Medical Library Association. hakia’s users can now trust what they find, because experts have vetted the sources."

I’ve said before that I think Hakia does a better job than Mahalo as it brings together human and machine search into a smarter page. Hakia needs to spend more time and effort on marketing now. They are competing with Google on the machine side, Mahalo on the human side, and now iMedix on the health side. All three competitors have serious money and some level of famous executives.

NY-based semantic search engine Hakia is announcing a new round of funding today in the amount of $5 million bringing the total funding to $21 million to-date. The new investment comes from current shareholder Prokom Investments S.A. Hakia notes that the new funds will be instrumental to hakia.com as it builds a semantic advertising platform and a European datacenter.

We’ve written about Hakia before including their demo at the NY Tech Meetup which I have embedded below.

I stand firm that hakia is a better solution than Mahalo and could actually be stronger than Wikia Search hopes to be. It’s unfortunate that they haven’t found the right avenues for promotion and buzz generation so far. I also think they need to figure out marketing messages for the technical people and for the mainstream users.

This discussion is about four topics related to Mahalo (and the general Internet):

1. Is Mahalo a clone of Hakia Gallery?
2. Corporate social tool usage
3. Where does Mahalo get their high Alexa ranking from?
4. 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!

Today I headed down to the financial district of NYC where the money is made. The area sure has changed since my time down there in the mid-90s. Hakia held an open demo for their ScoopBar which they demo'ed at the NY Tech Meetup this week. The open demo was at a local coffee shop near the Hakia office and there was a lot of foot traffic during my time with the team. This is such a great way to get local people to learn about your application. Hakia supports a local coffee shop, the local coffee shop supports Hakia, the community gets to learn about two companies making a difference in the community and it probably cost Hakia a couple hundred dollars in total. You might consider this type of community outreach when you launch your app. Alex at Read/WriteWeb has a great in-depth review of Hakia.

Here are my notes from the demo:

• The ScoopBar is great for anyone doing research – after installation, searching in the Hakia toolbar (i.e. Scoopbar) allows you to click a link and be taken to the actual Web site with the search highlighted (no need to find it) and then you can save the text (plus a buffer you select) to a local page on your hard drive. I could see this as a great tool for students and educators.
• Downloads are available for IE currently, Firefox version due out very soon
• A Web API is coming soon
• Downloads available through Download.com

Have you tried Hakia or the ScoopBar? If so, please report in!

Hakia was one of the presenters at the September NY Tech Meetup. They presented their new "scoop bar" which is a way to get content from a Web page and save it to a local file. Frankly I didn't get a full understanding of what this option in Hakia does but here is my attempt at an explanation. It appears that you do a search on Hakia, it provides results with the search query highlighted. Click the query and you jump to the Web page and the term is highlighted as well. Then you can click the scoop button on your browser (it's an add-on) and it asks you how much content from that page you want to save. Click save and it saves the selected text as a file on your hard drive. There were some questions around why it saves to the hard drive and not online. My question would be "what happens if the page changes" – for example, let's say it was a math equation (pi = 3.414x) and it changed, this document would not be updated and now you are left with a problem. If they offered an online repository that saved the content and then kept pinging for updates, that would be a better option. Could be a great researcher tool.

Check out the video of the demo below (you will note the person who let their phone ring!):