Ok, so i’ve completely thrown the idea of live blogging out of the window due to non-existing internet connectivity but i’ll be posting my notes one by one in the coming days…

Keynote day 3: Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com

Jason has quite a reputation as an industry renegade, so I looked quite forward to his session. For those of you who don’t know Jason, his recent venture is a ‘human-powered’ search engine. So instead of relying on fancy algorithms like Google, Jason relies on human editing to provides searches with relevant results.

Jason started off by clarifying his stance on SEO, as he’s generally known as the guy who thinks SEO is ‘absolute BS’. He now said that as far as SEO is about building relevant, user-friendly sites, he’s all for it :).
Mahalo looks similar to the old directory sites (and which failed one by one) but Jason believes their failure was due to their decreasing quality content. Mahalo with its human editing weeds out bad content.

The problem with this concept is though that the amount of work increases as the number of pages on the site increases. Not only do new pages need to be added, but all pages need to be maintained. To solve that problem, Mahalo is creating community involvement (like Wikipedia) to reduce their workload. Mahalo users have an interest in keeping the contents clean and relevant.

Another benefit of Mahalo is that site owners have input in the content that is being displayed on the search engine, unlike at other search engines. I believe that is a major selling point for a lot of merchants and big brands, who feel disempowered by the ‘big three’ regarding the information that is indexed and served to search engine users. Mahalo’s role is limited to doing QA on the content that is being submitted (about 20% of the links submitted by website owners are accepted). Spam doesn’t exist on Mahalo because they have no way of making it into the index

An additional feature of Mahalo is that it tries to combine search with the social graph (i.e. your social connections). Mahalo users can see who referred their search results, find movies recommended by their friends, etc. To do this Mahalo interacts with a number of online social networking sites to aggregate your social connections. That said, Jason doesn’t always believe in asking permission before scraping content from other website. He says asking for forgives gets you further :).

Jason made a very good point saying that what search needs is less pages, not more. Think about it, most searches on google generate millions of results and hardly anyone ever looks past the top ten. The industry should go back to valuing quality of quantity.

Mahalo would best be suited for the ‘mid-tail’. Google and other engines are pretty good at serving the long tail and the short tail. Getting the middle ground right is more difficult according to Jason. That’s where the human element and the social element of search can add value.