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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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TC40 Sounds Like a Joke

No offence to all of those who busted their asses to present at TC40 (or the demo pit, or whatever), or to those who worked hard behind the scenes to pull it all together. At the end of the day, though, TC40 sounds more and more like a TC insider-club joke, mainly because the winner - “Mint”:

1. Mint had ties to TechCrunch (old TC writer working there).;
2. Mint had two investors on the TC40 voting panel (nice edge).
3. Mint is a branded version of white label financial app Yodlee with some sketchy, poorly working functionality hastily tacked on top. (see Yodlee MoneyCenter).
4. Mint had already taken $5M in funding.

So - from a field of hungry startups, TC40 chose the one heavily connected to the panel, with a marginal value proposition, little innovation (their business model is freaking credit card referrals), and little need for $50k. I can see why TechCrunch has a small but vocal crowd of detractors - the choice of Mint as a winner is - from where I’m seated - a credibility hit against Calacanis, Arrington, and TC.

arrington, calacanis, mint, tc20, tc40, techcrunch, uncov yodlee

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Recommendations & Discovery are the New Search

Recommendations and discovery are becoming more and more important - to the internet in general, but also specifically as a complement, supplement, and (gasp!) replacement to core search activities.

The big question I’m wondering is how long it will be before a “Search” box appears on the StumbleUpon home page - leveraging their human derived index to allow for narrowly focused, highly relevant stumbling.

In one sense, the rise of “R&D” can be seen as a response to Google’s dominance - services like StumbleUpon, Medium, and so on offer entrepreneurs and investors a way around Google to influence people’s web-usage patterns.

In another sense, however, the evolution of R&D is a natural consequence of technology’s march. R&D services are fundamentally search engines: they just use a different class of algorithm (clickstream correlation), and accept queries in a less-structured fashion. Effectively, R&D services are another point in the spectrum of human vs. algorithmic search options: Google pins down one end, while Mahalo, ChaCha, and even Yahoo! Answers compete at the other. StumbleUpon and their ilk exist in the center blending the human element (clickstreams) with the machine (automated aggregation and analysis).

Continue Reading…

calacanis, chacha, delicious, google, mahalo, medium, search, stumbleupon yahoo

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FoxMarks to Power Search Engine, kill Mahalo

TechCrunch reports that Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3 fame) is building out his bookmark synchronization service Foxmarks into a search engine, using meta-data entered by users to power search results. Foxmarks counts 20 million unique URL’s in its human-powered index.

Del.icio.us should have been used by Yahoo! to do this the day after they were acquired. I suggested something similar in an earlier discussion about how Google’s AdSense could better serve ads. Point being: Yahoo is again failing to innovate or capitalize on their assets. They truly are the death by shareholder standard bearer.

Is Foxmarks a Google killer? Probably not. But: they have a growing asset with their human powered index, and the core bookmark-syncing system provides a value-added vector for spreading the tool and the brand. A flurry of press coverage could provide it with the impetus it needs to grab a piece of the search pie.

Is Foxmarks a Mahalo killer? Yes. Search engines fall on a continuum of totally alogorithmic (Google) and totally human (DMOZ, Mahalo). Foxmarks sits in the middle, occupying what I think is the sweet spot - it blends the volume handling of the algorithm with the data categorization of humans, adds in aggregation to increase credibility and smooth outrider results, and bundles it all together.

Of course, all of this discussion is academic. I haven’t seen Foxmarks in action, as I wasn’t at Foo Camp.

algorithm, calacanis, foxmarks, google, mahalo, search seo

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Mahalo’s launched a closed DMOZ

Warning: this is a lousy post. I’m exhausted after consecutive 14 hour days at the office.

Back when the Internet was new and fresh, Yahoo changed the world with its human powered search index. Time marched on, Yahoo went algorithmic, and the human-index torch was taken up by DMOZ: The Open Directory Project. DMOZ was, and continues to be, a human categorized index of websites: anyone can an editor, and DMOZ claims 4,830,584 sites indexed by 75,151 editors.

Of course, DMOZ has fallen on hard times. Originally sponsored by Netscape, AOL and Netscape still claim ownership and do little to throw attention its way. So, the DMOZ human-indexed directory of the web languishes in obscurity while projects like Mahalo by and large re-invent the wheel.

Its weird. Some minor functionality tweaks, and DMOZ - categorizing the internet since 1998 - could have been Wikipedia. A little SEO applied to the DMOZ site templates and it could be huge again. Why are AOL and Netscape sitting on a historical gold-mine of data and a once-viable user community and doing nothing with it?

Let’s get back to Mahalo and re-inventing the wheel. TC has a good summary, and there’s the Calacanis post and press release too. In a nutshell: Mahalo offers human indexed search results to top queries, building a growing library of indexed-queries over time, falling back to Google results when no human indexed results are present.

My Random thoughts…

1. So - essentially, they’re rebuilding DMOZ - associating websites with keywords manually - but doing so in a closed, system dependent on the preferences and goodwill of the editors.
2. Do you want your results selected by an individual? Personally, I’m more comfortable with a community (DMOZ), and most comfortable with an algorithm (Google!) that is at least impartial, if not as always perfect.
3. Does the human index solve the problem of poorly constructed queries?
4. So… what does Mahalo do better or different? What sets is apart from the always in the margins ChaCha? Hasn’t About.com been doing this for years too?
5. Personally, I think DMOZ has been long under-utilized by both the searching public, and companies that could tap its open database of indexed links.

Prognostication

Mahalo will get a small dedicated following and grow very slowly before topping out a marginal but respectable market share of a few percent. Its not enough of anything new to have a big impact. Its not “better enough” than anything out there to have a major impact. The main thing that will kickstart its popularity will be the savvy marketing of Calacanis. Expect it to fade to obscurity quickly when Calacanis leaves.

More Coverage

1. CenterNetworks has a great roundup of some of the issues around Mahalo. Is this just a big link farm SEO play?
2. Rex Dixon agrees with Allen.
3. Redeye VC compares Mahalo to ancient pre-bubble1.0 human index Magellan.
4. Webware relates Mahalo’s strategy to target the short tail.

aol, calacanis, dmoz, google, mahalo, netcape, opendirectory, search wikipedia

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A Question for Jason C.: How would Netscape have handled “the Number”?

Jason - glad to hear you’re back to Fatblogging - the transparency and your efforts are always inspiring.

That having been said, here’s my question for you and your old Netscape team: How would Netscape and the Navigators (good name for a band) have handled the sh!tstorm on Digg this week over the HD-DVD number?

Would it have gone up? Did it go up? Was it blocked? I’m not sure how to search the Netscape News Stories that have been voted on, but this search (News > Top Stories) turned up no results.

Anyway, I’m curious - given that AOL is close to the entertainment industry, more “corporate” etc - would the community have won out there?

calacanis, digg, hddvd, jasoncalacanis netscape

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Friday Listening Post: The killer mashups of Luke Enlow, downloadable MP3’s

TGIF, and time for another Friday Listening post. The first was here (Billy Bragg) - basically, the spirit of this series of posts is that Friday is time to chill and check out some tunes that can be at least vaguely related back to the world of technology.

I’d hoped some other blogs would share some tunes and expand my horizons (just tag your post “fridaylistening” and it will queue up with any others on Technorati) - but no dice so far! How about it, Jason? (couldn’t resist taking the bait somewhere today, though I didn’t follow any rules.)

Anyway - without further adieu: I strongly recommend checking out the audio stylings of Luke Enlow - Bostonian and audio mashup auteur. Lenlow mashes up artists, genres, beats, and riffs into catchy, inspired tunes.

In particular, I recommend (right-click, Save As time):

Mercedes Beck: A spectular mashup of Beck and Janis Joplin - sounds like they were in the studio together.

Get Eastwood: The Gorillaz and Sean Paul in a mix that just works.

Kanye Mahna - Mr. West vs. the Muppets - wicked.

…and pretty much all of the rest of them too. Always creative, always fun, always mashing up - Luke Enlow personifies Music 2.0.

beck, boston, calacanis, fridaylistening, joplin, kanye, lenlow, luke enlow, mashup mashups

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Ask put their foot in it, SEO 95/5, Metasearch = Bad

3 quick ones that stuck out for me today, with the common thread of being search engine related:

1. Valleywag: Ask launched a guerilla campaign against Google that has pissed off and alienated users. Whoops - shows what attack/smear ads will do for you.
2. Danny Sullivan breaks down the 5% of SEO that earns SEO firms their dollars: URL structure, link buying, IP cloaking, template mods, agency life. The funny thing are is the number of times he explains “this used to be blackhat…”
3. Jason Calacanis walks us through the questionable legality of metasearch, or “search engine aggregators” that serve up results from multiple sources using automated background querying.

ask, calacanis, google, metasearch, search, searchengineland, seo techfold

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