Mahalo's new spam is worse than old | Hacker News Reader

Mahalo's new spam is worse than old

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130 pointstomh-42 comments

Can we please stop giving Mahalo and Jason Calacanis more airtime than they deserve ?

Every post like this just fuels the fire and creates more drama around the theme and in the end will benefit the spammer.

There is no such thing as 'bad publicity'.

Companies like Google care about and have responded to populist uprisings like this in the past (especially as it relates to search quality). I imagine that's the actual goal here.

Why would they? This generates revenue for Google.

There's no excuse for them not having banning them from day one, like they do every other individual trying to capitalize on the same tactics -- only the sheer capitalization and size that Jason brought to the table allowed him to get away with this at scale.

Shame on Google for having double standards, IMHO.

Google has made revenue negative banning decisions in the past. They have demonstrated that they recognize that the long-term quality of their index is more important than short term profits.

Every banning is against revenue, yet Mahalo still is operational......... Google's lack of definitive action against Mahalo's outright spam is the clear example here.

Google ultimately generates revenue from people using their engine and ad server to find things. If the quality thereof goes down, you will see people flow out of Google. If you say, no, that won't happen, remember people have to flow into Google in the first place... it's not the default search engine for the majority of installs...

If mahalo were pulled from the rankings, other pages, most likely of better quality, would fill that space.

There is nothing to prevent them from using adsense to monetize the quality of their (non-scraped) content.

If google cared they could switch him off in 2 seconds flat.

And if they're not aware by now they're asleep at the switch.

You're conflating Google's caring about the alleged practice and the public's perception of the practice.

If people are qualitatively unhappy with search results, Google will care. These posts serve to highlight that displeasure.

I think it's a mistake to think of large corporations as singular entities in these sorts of cases. Given what I know about big-company politics, I am positive that there are people inside Google who support banning Mahalo and others who do not. Political battles like these are not resolved quickly, and an ongoing visible public backlash is the best weapon those who support banning him have.

If mahalo is 'borderline' or even 'ok' to a large faction inside Google they have real problems.

No. This isn't someone commenting on an inflammatory comment that Calacanis made in order to attract attention. It's someone outing Calacanis for shady business practices, and putting more pressure on Google to end those practices.

It's part of the search engine scammer playbook to stay just close enough to the line for people like us to get exhausted hearing about it.

Calacanis shady business practices have been outed for months, plenty of google employees read HN, there really is no reason for him to still be around in the google index.

Yup, this is the worst part, he is getting away with this even though tens of Google employees, and i'm sure including Matt Cutts, have read these articles. They do nothing about it..

It's come to the point where I actively avoid SEO-optimized sites on Google. If I see my search terms in the URL ("how-to-become-a-travel-agent") of a result, I'll just skip over it. Even moreso when there is generic, cut-and-paste content in the description. SEO may help you rank, but you won't get any clicks from me until I've run out of options.

Alas, the Law of Facebook Login states that people will click anything on Google because they blindly trust Google.

Wasn't Mahalo's founding goal to improve search by creating quality pages written by humans, without the spam and low quality content you get with traditional search engines?

That's what I remember too. Guess they figured out it was hard, and they couldn't compete with Wikipedia.

The charitable explanation: in the course of growing the business, Mahalo discovered that the tools they had created to support the "quality pages written by humans" were sufficiently powerful that laying off most of the humans and transitioning the rest to a "We pay you with Mahalo Dollars, which are sort of like a real dollar except for the bit about being able to be spent on goods and services" model did not affect the business in the slightest. Accordingly, Mahalo pivoted away from the original vision in the direction that the actual results demonstrated was working.

The uncharitable explanation: "quality pages written by humans" is a bit of PR for Valley consumption (and, ahem, Googleplex consumption) designed to make Mahalo "too high profile to bounce out of the index like a black hat spam site."

My HOSTS file:

    # localhost: Needs to stay like this to work
    127.0.0.1   localhost
    127.0.0.1   www.mahalo.com

Warning: This will redirect every second google search result to your localhost!

What a load of sh*t those pages from Mahalo are. The guide for free wifi in Chicago for example is way off and completely misleading.

There's no need to rely on search engines to find pages full of useful information. I do broad topical research, and I've managed to find pretty decent concentrated sources on most topics online. There are many fine specialist websites, and blogs, done by knowledgeable human beings.

It takes time to find them and organize them (I use a custom database rather than bookmarks). SE's are fine for quick, one-off searches that -aren't important- ... otherwise, human expertise is far preferable, and always will be.

Someone should setup a public site to petition google to get sites like this banned from the index.

Also, just relax and have a beer at the This Week in Startups party at SXSW.... life is too short to be so angry/upset about nothing!

RSVP here www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=342222228076&ref=mf

I'm not the worst guy in the world... you'll actually have a good time.

If you're willing to make a few hundred thousand people have more trouble finding what they're looking for by landing them on your stub pages, just for your personal gain, does that make you the best guy in the world?

Jason, it be better served if you address the original points rather than side step them..

What's the point of responding if the trolls just vote you down?

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1176362

This is becoming sad. Really... some folks need to get a life.

That is actually quite typical of you, Jason. You respond to well documented and well written articles that cast you and your actions in a negative light by avoiding any discussion whatsoever that actually addresses those facts, by making more stuff up with zero substantiation, and by insulting and lying about the authors of said posts... but anyone who disagrees with you is a troll.

You are a fucking piece of work Jason. Seriously.

@Devilboy - technically speaking it was the noindex tags that disappeared (and which he refuses to address). There was never a nofollow meta tag on the pages.

Yep sorry that's what I meant

You were downvoted because you didn't address the question at hand (disappearing NOFOLLOW refs) at all!

For someone who claims they value debate and conversation you seem to expose the opposite in your posts here..

What are you afraid of sir?

Some honest debate? Get real sir

Your non logic in this area seems to turn people off who were fans of your work in other areas..

Some of us are extremely disappointed in your responses coming from someone, in your own self appointment , who claim to support relevant results from search engine searches.

If it makes you feel any better, there are currently 23 upvotes on the comment you linked to, even though its score is -3. So there are a lot of people who are ready to give you a hearing, if you want that.

It's true that users here can sometimes behave like a mob. But there are also a lot, possibly even a majority, who can be convinced by cogent arguments regardless of who they come from. Whereas if you give up and get mad, you lose those as well.

I think it's time to weigh in with the question I have asked you in just about every thread

When are we going to see the noindexing you promised?

From the latest round of commentary looks like some were implemented for a bit - then removed. Which now looks somewhat worse for you... (IMO anyway).

Still not hopeful of an answer though...

You forgot to sign with "peace and love". Although maybe that's because it's been ringing hollow lately... might I suggest that you also add "xoxo" to your signature? Maybe that'll win people over.

"I'm not the worst guy in the world..."

You're setting the bar quite high for yourself, there.

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