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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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When AdSense Fails

For all Google’s algorithmic awesomeness, the AdSense crawler still has the incredible ability to suck at keyword analysis. Take, for example, the awesomely popular Desktop Tower Defence game. Check out the AdSense placements:

Yes, that’s an ad for some type of antenna tower, because the page says “Tower” on it in a number of places.

Meanwhile, the perfectly serviceable meta keyword and content tags tell the real story:

<meta name=”description” content=”A flash version of Warcraft III TD”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”warcraft, flash, game”>

So - Goolge is missing some killer targeted inventory, and HandDrawnGames is missing revenue. Is there no opportunity to create a better connection between content and ad placement here?

1. Meta Tags: I understand that meta tags are easily abused and Google by-and-large disregards them. What about algorithmically assessing the credibility of meta tags on a site by site basis on the criteria of URL age, history, and traffic pattern?
2. Webmaster Tools & AdSense: Again why not let webmasters categorize their sites in Google’s Webmaster Tools, allowing superior placement? Again, a credibility algorithm could reduce the impact from link farms, etc.
3. Tie into DMOZ: Ok, DMOZ is dead in the water. But perhaps its time to resurrect it, and make use of it as a categorization engine for AdSense. Crank up the community profile of DMOZ again, and surface its “category lookup” as a free API, of which AdSense would be the biggest but not only customer.
4. Del.icio.us: Ok, the Yahoo ownership might make this sticky for Google, but Del.icio.us URL tag history would be a great way to categorize sites for AdSense inventory purposes. Sure del.icio.us can be gamed, but so can anything, and community self-policing tends to dampen gamed popularity spikes. Perhaps Yahoo should be using this as a source of competitive advantage in Panama?

Are people at the search engines thinking of these sort of things? I would have thought Google would be all over this, given that relevance was what made AdSense king in the first place.

adsense, del.icio.us, delicious, desktoptowerdefence, dmoz, dtd, google, meta, metatages, panama, tags, warcraft yahoo

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