human search Archive

RefSeek is a new NY-based search engine that’s targeting students and researchers. The company describes themselves as, "RefSeek.com searches the entire Web for freely available academic information, providing relevant results while filtering out most commercial content."

Their demo shows the difference between results on Google and RefSeek for the term "flowers". On Google you get florists in the results, on RefSeek you get plant sciences listings. 

Stan Schroeder wonders if there’s a real reason to switch to RefSeek from Google. Stan notes, "Unfortunately for RefSeek, once you start thinking from a scientist, student, or a researcher’s standpoint, Google – surprisingly – doesn’t fare all that bad."

From my perspective, RefSeek would work well if they went with the Hakia model. Offer a very strong human-powered directory along with search when needed. Make it so the directory answers about 80% of the needs of their target market and let the search handle the other 20%.

Reports have been arriving in my inbox and on Twitter that Mahalo has been up and down the past couple of days. In my testing today, I get error messages on about 65% of page loads. So far no official word from Mahalo except postings that they are doing a movie screening tonight

We are also hearing that Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is planning to reveal the new Mahalo 2.0 later this week at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. On a recent podcast, Calacanis noted that the site had 4.6 million unique visitors in August. Calacanis points to Quantcast as his favorite metric service as it shows a nice upward traffic trend for Mahalo (it’s unverified traffic). Andrew Baron from Rocketboom pointed to Google Trends to show the complete opposite, a slow trending down in traffic. Perhaps all of their pages on the election are getting hit hard and that’s causing the outages.

If you use Mahalo and are experiencing any errors please leave them in the comments. Here’s what the page looks like when you receive the error message:

Wikia has announced the launch of a search application framework today. The framework is called "Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions" or WISE. Developers create search applications named WISEApp(s). From the documentation: there are two main components to a WISEApp — (i) the application definition object and (ii) the javascript file which contains the actual code executed for the application. You will need to create both for your WISEApp to function properly.

While on the surface this might look like a replacement for Google’s site search or other local search tools, Wikia’s WISE is more of a developer complement. WISE could be used to create some VERY large and powerful mashups. You can combine the search with other APIs including Yahoo’s BOSS search API. There’s a developer’s guide to help you get startup working with WISE.

Here’s a sample application from the presidential debates.

Wikia’s Search remains a community-edited search index. The basic idea is if you know a better result for a search query, you can add it instantly instead of recommending it like you have to on other mainstream search engines.

Launch partners include NY-based Snooth, Digg, Last.fm, AccuWeather and the Washington Post. The Vaynerchuk brothers’ startup PleaseDress.Me is also using this new WISE search application framework for their tshirt search engine. I was able to grab some screenshots of some of the current apps and they are displayed below.

Check out Wikia’s launch in August of their "evolution toolbar" and all of our Wikia coverage.

This morning we reported on the updated product launch for NY-based semantic search provider Hakia. There were a variety of good reviews here, here, here, here, here and here. During my time at Search Marketing Expo, I met with Hakia COO Melek Pulatkonak who provided a demo and answered a few questions on how the updated Hakia search works. Check out our brief discussion below.

Today I headed over to the Javits Center for the Search Marketing Expo. Below is a video of what’s in their schwag bag. One thing that I left at the conference was the 500-700 page binder of all of the slides and session materials. No idea why they still see a need to print these out – why not stick a printer next to the registration desk and let attendees select which sessions they want to print. Perhaps stick all of the slides on a USB key. The waste of paper and more importantly the weight is just crazy – especially when baggage in flight is getting more expensive every day.

NY-based Hakia has announced a relaunch of their search engine service today. Hakia is a semantic search engine which uses partial human filtered results to help get past the typical search results. Today the company is adding an even stronger human element: the "credible Web sites" index.

What this means is when you complete a search on Hakia, you can select to see only sites that Hakia deems "credible". The credible sites list will be vetted by librarians and informational professionals.

Hakia has also launched "hakia Galleries" which bring together all types of search results (image, text, credible, etc.) on a topic basis. It’s an interesting way to provide the data rather than for an absolute specific query.

I like the Hakia team and love that they are in NYC. But they have to start marketing the search engine. Get up to Times Square and setup a corner where you can show tourists why Hakia is better than Google. Let those tourists go back to their countries and spread the word. Sure I am simplifying things, but they have to raise the level of awareness to drive search volume. They don’t have a CEO who can push links to tens of thousands of Twitter users for quick traffic boosting. Booths at tradeshows won’t cut it alone.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis had a busy week last week. We learned of three major Mahalo updates: they are now a research engine, if you want to get paid you must write more and link less, SEO is critical for the success of the research engine.

Mahalo is no longer a search engine as it was classified upon the initial launch nearly a year ago. Calacanis is now calling his company a "research engine". While I don’t think it’s a search engine, it’s not a research engine either. The closest thing I could compare it to is a combo of delicious plus a couple paragraphs of juicy content.

When Mahalo launched, I asked Calacanis whether the site was created for the purpose of driving traffic through search engines. He noted, "Are we an SEO master? If Google wants to index us well that’s fine with us, but our model is not based on being well indexed in Google or Yahoo. Our model is in creating human curated search results that are very helpful to users."

In an email to his greenhouse workers last week, he changed his tune. "No guide notes, no google/yahoo rankings, and no traffic. No traffic, no money. No money, we all go home." With nearly 75% of Mahalo traffic coming from Google, this guide note change is important. It would be interesting to learn what percentage of traffic must leave via advert or affiliate link for Mahalo to be profitable.

Last week, Calacanis changed the policy for his large workforce by mandating a minimum of 300-400 word guide notes. These are typically the only content on a (non how-to) page. My guess is that this lengthening of the guide notes is a direct response to Aaron Wall’s post that Mahalo is Spam.

In case you are interested in where the search engine traffic is coming from, I ran a paid report on Compete for the 50 most popular terms sending traffic from Google to Mahalo:

mahalo, how to play guitar, big brother 9 spoilers, halo 3 skulls, 2 girls 1 cup, best computer speakers, halo 3 armor, ashley dupree, gene simmons sex tape, bridget mccain, how to write a resume, guitar hero 3 cream, christopher allport, how to make mash potatoes, abby, mcgrew, tax rebate 2008, how to make sushi, vicki iseman, guitar hero cheats, lindsay lohan new york magazine, guitar hero 3 cheats, guitar hero 3 song list, super smash bros brawl secret characters, brawl secret stages, guitar hero iii cheats, pokemon crater, amy fisher video, sarah larson, big brother 9 spoiler, is new york pregnant, cloverfield monster pictures, how to speak french, flat belly diet, wikipedia ashlee simpson, guitar hero 3 wii cheats, parkville maryland bethany, bush tax rebate, wwe smackdown v.s. raw 2008 online guide, lil romeo 50 million, daisy de la hoya, flavorofloveworld, youtube heavy metal don felder, dorothy hamill skating timeline, net gun, dmc4 secret achievements, lost odyssey game guide, nfl tour review, blazing angels 2 cheats, silver skulls in halo 3, halo 3 armor unlock

I believe we will continue to see a shift with Mahalo which will push unpaid people to create, edit and maintain the content on Mahalo. Guide notes have already been opened for editing if you have more than one published item and links are already provided by the community. Though as Dunan Riley noted yesterday about another site similar to Mahalo which also works perfectly here, "With no revenue sharing model there’s no obvious reason why someone would contribute to the Wiki (after all there’s no for the good of humanity angle like Wikipedia)".

Later this week we will look at why Calacanis is pretty smart.