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Finding Dulcinea: Attack of the Mahalo Clones

Finding Dulcinea is a freshly launched Mahalo clone that’s labelled itself “librarian of the internet.” How much of a clone, you ask? How about this quote from their PR Newswire release:

“A recent survey showed that 85 percent of all search queries fail; the user tries and tries again, but eventually succumbs to search-engine fatigue,” said Mark Moran, CEO of findingDulcinea. “Our Web site is the cure.”

Or, this quote from the “Why Use This Site” page:

“How much time have you wasted online, wading through a sea of useless or unreliable information? Online searches may give you millions of search results in under a second, but you’re left to sift through them yourself. Our team has spent more than 40,000 hours scouring the Internet for the best resources on thousands of topics. We distill our research with knowledge, judgment and insight, presenting you with Web sites that are clear, informative, and enlightening.”

Sound familiar? It is, because its more or less Jason Calacanis’s story for Mahalo.

Let’s have a look…

The first thing you’ll notice about the FD landing page is… there’s no search box. For an “Internet Librarian,” this seems odd. Regardless of how many hours FD has spent compiling useful data, they’ve made it hard to find. In fact, believe it or not, the ONLY way to get to FD content appears to be navigating taxonomy trees. Don’t believe me? Check out the tour.

Oh, but wait, here’s an article that references the CEO’s response to the problem:

“While findingDulcinea currently has no search engine, Moran says the site will add one in about a month which will be limited to some 25,000 sites chosen by its staff of writers and researchers. The company currently has a full-time staff of about 30, along with 25 freelance contributors.” [from MediaPost]

Ummmm… what? I think both the article writer and Mr. Moran missed the concept: FD indexing the web (or a slice thereof) shouldn’t even be on the radar when FD doesn’t even index its own content.

I wonder if Mr. Moran realizes that in FD’s quest to make information readily available, they’ve taken the “search” transaction from a simple keyword search followed by a click and turned it into a multistep, multi-teired quest through someone else’s content taxonomy.

Anyway…

FindingDulcinae is divided into three sections. “Web Guides” are equivalents to Mahalo SERP’s (Search Engine Response Pages - the result of a query). “Beyond the Healines” is a stab at supplementing topical news items, and “Netcetra” is basically a featured-SERP holding penn. I’m going to focus in on the Web Guides here as it appears to be the core of the business, and the other site sections are essentially alterations to the core guide concept.

Web Guides follow the form of a brief introduction, followed by a list of questions commonly associated with the guides topic, for example, NYC…

Expanding a question reveals a narrower topical summary divided into “Insights” - summaries of important points - and “picks” - well-described external links.

The content of the day’s featured guide (NYC) seemed to be well organized and well thought-out, and included good descriptions and valid links that seemed appropriate to the site’s intended audience.

FD NYC:

Mahalo NYC:

Compare the FD NYC page to the Mahalo NYC page and you’ll see the difference - FD has a lot more human processing going into the construction of their pages; in comparison, the Mahalo SERP looks as sparse as a Google page. While the human-authored text on the page doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of the links selected for inclusion, the impression communicated is that FD is both friendlier and better researched.

Of course, I can’t even really link to the FD NYC page, because I can’t freaking find it. Its today’s featured Web Guide, which apparently excludes it from the painful-to-navigate taxonomy. Speaking of which, I finally found where it should be - which is apparently under travel, though given the nature of much of the page’s content, I’d expect it to be under a “cities” category, which doesn’t exist. Attention Mr. Moran: this is the conceptual confustion and cognitive dissonance that imposing one person’s arbitrary taxonomy onto an entire population causes. Compare to Mahalo: I got to their NYC page in with three keystrokes (”N” “Y” “C”) and one click, and Mahalo has a consistent, clean, easy-to-link-to URL.

So let’s leave it at that.

In a nutshell: FD is too early out of the gate, presumably to meet the Christmas rush. Core parts of the user experience are completely missing (SEARCH) or ill-thought out (lousy taxonomy). That being said: FD has what appears to be a great repository of deeply researched content; my suggestion to them is that they abandon their web search engine ideas and focus their development budget inward.

FWIW I’d also suggest a less esoteric name for the site that’s easier to remember and spell. People might not no what “Mahalo” means, but its short, sonorous, and easy to spell and recall.

calacanis, finding dulcinae mahalo

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