Comments on: Jason Calacanis Mahalo Diggbait – Lies Or Credit?

By: Musings & Meanderings » Blog Archive » More Musing On Mahalo

Musings & Meanderings » Blog Archive » More Musing On Mahalo — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:08:40 +0000

[...] up on others, including more of Jason Calacanis’s, those of Dave Winer, of Dave Sifry, of Andy Beard, and even the amusing Valleywag outing of [...]

By: Julian

Julian — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:01:21 +0000

I completely agree with you Andy and one important thing everyone is missing, is that Mahalo’s “search results” are being indexed by the other search engines, the real ones. I don’t think many search engines do this, why put an extra step to users searching at Google? More and more I’m beginning to think that Calacanis’ master plan is to rank Mahalo pages at the top for the major keywords out there (let’s say 10000 :)) and make some bucks.

One of the greatest anti-SEO positioning result pages at Google? I’ve seen it all…

By: Jenn

Jenn — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 01:32:14 +0000

The way Mahalo is going at the moment, I don’t see how it is any different from Squidoo (which he likes to slam) or Hubpages. It certainly isn’t a search engine.

By: Morton Gambit

Morton Gambit — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 23:44:56 +0000

Do you notice now how Jason submits every “how-to” page to every social site – digg, delicious, reddit, netscape and stumbleupon and then begs his blog readers to hit them?

I wonder when he will have his greenhouse start to digg everything too so that every how-to hits the home page. Of course that is probably happening now as at least half the votes come from confirmed mahalo people.

I guess search engine didnt work so now we try how-to engine.

By: Mahalo: POS Search Engine! : Big Bucks Blogger

Mahalo: POS Search Engine! : Big Bucks Blogger — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:56:51 +0000

[...] tip to Andy Beard for drawing my attention to recent “improvement” to [...]

By: lucia

lucia — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:57:43 +0000

So is Mahalo trying to be “About.com”?

I visited Mahalo yesterday. One things for sure: It’s one wretched search engine!

By: markus941

markus941 — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:07:56 +0000

I completely agree that Mahalo has taken a long departure from a “search engine”.

At some level I respect what Jason started to do, but now it seems like the entire model has shifted dramatically. I don’t know if it’s a lack of focus, a lack of good management, or what – but it seems like an ever-shifting project.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:48:55 +0000

This is how I have responded to some of Jason’s fans on YouTube (he linked through from Twitter to the video)

The quality of the content is not under question, it is exceptional.

That isn’t however the point…

Jason Calacanis launched a search engine that was intended to improve search results by editing them by hand and finding those gems that don’t rise to the top because of “evil SEOs”

A “Search Results Page” is quite “free form” in structure, and when better content is discovered it can easily be included within the body of the page.

What Mahalo are now creating are “How Tos” with detailed information, with a few links at the end to other content.
It would be very time consuming to change these “how to” like “search results pages” to include information on alternative methods and alternative services

Mahalo was intended to highlight the best content on the web, not replace it.

I previously had some sympathy for Mahalo because the purpose was highlighting good content, and they even gave good links.

It would have been very easy to highlight the good content in such as way as to not take away the value of the original content.

I don’t look on this as being a “whiner”, I think it is a paradigm shift in emphasis that needed to be highlighted.

By: Michael Martine

Michael Martine — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:41:50 +0000

If he did realise it, then in the podcast he wasn’t telling the whole truth about his future plans to publish diggbait.

I suppose that depends on how long it would take implement the change.

You and Graywolf and the others all had some great criticism of Mahalo, but you’re not doing yourself any favors now by looking for something that isn’t there. Makes you look like a bit of a whiner.