Recently, I came across a Newsweek article entitled “Revenge of the Experts”. (Quick summary: The article questions whether or not the era of user-generated content on the web is on the way out with the rise of edited information/sites by professionals. ) This automatically piqued my curiosity because as a GLIS student I have been inundated with information about Web 2.0 tools and because as an English teacher I must teach my students to be wary about the information they find on the Internet, given the inaccuracies, frauds, and spammers on some of the sites. While I love Web 2.0 tools like Wikipedia and YouTube, I do rely on more expert sites or databases for important research or questions I may have, so I can see how more “expert” sites, rather than user-generated or social-networking sites, could be on the rise.
One new search engine that was featured in this Newsweek article was Mahalo.com, which markets itself as the world’s first human-generated search engine. Mahalo uses human beings in seeking out the sites that best fit the user’s request. Mahalo “guides” or experts, who are paid, submit search results pages to a centralized database, which users can then access for search results. Their results do not contain any links to spam, mediocre, or deceptive sites. It also breaks the search term down into different types of results for the user. For example, “julius caesar” is broken down by the top 7 recommended sites, and then sub-categories about his life or other genres related to the term like movie, play, Shakespeare, blogs, etc. I love the guide note feature, located on the right-hand side of the screen, that shows a picture of the search term (if available) and lists fast facts–very user-friendly and engaging.
There are some downsides of Mahalo.com, though. One concern is that Mahalo does not have pages written for all search terms, i.e. “Antigone.” However, the page will return Google results alongside tabbed results from other search engines and online services, so a user isn’t at a complete loss. One can also request Mahalo guides to write a page for a specific search term.
Despite Mahalo.com being an “expert”-generated site, it still contains some Web 2.0 features. For example, one can sign up for a RSS feed of Mahalo’s top newsfeeds or add/become a friend of Mahalo or Mahalo Social, so you can share your results with friends/colleagues. Plus, if you use Mahalo Follow, you can simultaneously submit links to your Twitter or Del.icio.us accounts. They also allow the public to recommend links for a page or discuss a page on the message board. There is even a program, called Mahalo Greenhouse, where anyone can write search result pages and get paid for each page that is accepted to Mahalo (note–you have to be accepted by the experts!).
After spending some time with Mahalo, I am impressed. As a librarian, I would list this search engine on the library’s webpage for users. Of course, this site won’t help all users since there are still many terms that do not have pages written for them yet, but at least Mahalo supplies some of the best results for a given topic, rather than searching through the millions of pages/links listed on the basic search engine sites.
