Mahalo Caught Spamming Google With PageRank Funneling Link Scheme
seobook.com
seobook.com
Syndicating tech headlines to a tech blog does actually help people. Also, syndicating the questions you've asked/answered with our Mahalo Answers widget also helps folks.
Also, I've never claimed we are so much innovative as practical. We really just try to do the simple thing: provide folks with the content, links and Q&A they want. The big win of Mahalo will be if we save a lot of people a LOT of time and keep them safe.
That being said the system is fairly advanced running on things like hadoop, nginx, memecache, etc.
Also, the idea of putting a virtual currency with knowledge exchange has never been done. If it works we will have done something fairly historic: created a currency for knowledge. That really hasn't been done before. I've been around the world in the last two years looking at virtual currency and knowledge exchange in places like Korean, China and Japan and the truth is folks are using it for games 99% of the tim e (the other 1% is virtual gifts).
We're the ONLY people to have ever put a currency on a knowledge exchange. That's fairly innovative from what folks have told me.... in fact some fairly intelligent folks have called it very innovative to brilliant.
.... time will tell I guess. :-)
all the best, Jason
ps - if anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers signup and send me your account name (or post the URL here) and I'll send you M$5 to spend.
Are you kidding me? Tell that to Bankrate.com
i don't think you can do it any longer, but there are still plenty of posts on the internet where people talk about it.
Gaming the google ranking system is only effective because of the monoculture.
You honestly believe Google would ever blacklist a prominent startup like Mahalo?
I don't understand why Calacanis or Mahalo are important enough to warrant such special treatment, but I don't think I'm Mahalo's target audience. I've never visited the site. That's why I was interested in more information. Thanks!
Sure. Google's trust and search quality are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Mahalo is not.
I must honestly admit I have no idea who Mahalo is, and by reading this headline I automatically assumed it was a spam network.
They might be well known and influential to you, but that doesn't automatically translate to the rest of the internet.
nice connection there
Everyone has a blog roll, and most blogs have a "WIN Grid" at the bottom (a feature I created at Weblogs, Inc. where at the bottom of engadget/autoblog/joystiq/etc you see the headlines from the other sites).
From what I've seen said at conference the search engines only pass a small amount of page rank from these areas so it's not a major deal to syndicate your content around.
HackADay is now owned by Mahalo (we didn't sell it to AOL in the WEblogs, Inc. sale for obvious reasons... like hacking TimeWarner cable boxes :-). There is nothing wrong with syndicating headlines between mahalo and HackAday. If we're told there is we will stop.
This is just the SEO community upset at me for saying that "seo is BS" back in 1995!
I think it's more of a case where they are upset at you for gaming them for knowledge and advice, then beating them at their own game, which, by the way, has resulted in me having a tremendous amount of admiration for you...
You've 'scaled' SEO and kept the product quality. Kudos, J.
Edit: Oh, and it was 2005, not 1995 - since you seem to appreciate people correcting you ;^)
Pagerank turned out to be the death knell to the value of linking to someone, it created an opportunity to be gamed so large that it changed the nature of the object (the internet) that it was supposed to be measuring.
A good measuring device does not 'load' the circuit to the point that it stops to function...
If you introduce a new system, it has to be at least as good as what we have now: no one would want to sacrifice relevant results.
It is wrong to think about pagerank as a single algorithm: it is a family, the common things being that these algorithms analyze the global link graph (yes, I lumped the HITS algorithm in the same family).
The problem is, if you don't use the link graph, there is not much left. There is the content, but this is not enough: before Google you could often steal someone's high ranking by just copying his content verbatim or maybe tweaking it a little. So, pagerank is actually a big improvement over what was out there before.
Pagerank can be thought as an estimation of the traffic a website gets. Suppose you can measure the actual traffic (e.g. by forcing all sites to install google analytics). That would be a pretty well gaming-proofed system, but you would introduce so much inertia - every new site would have a huge chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.
Isn't this problem already all over the place?
Don't get me wrong, sometimes 'copying' is great when somebody truly believes they can solve a problem better, but that doesn't seem the case here — the only new feature I see is that you can add a bounty to your question; other than that, I see no advantage over Yahoo! Answers.
It's actually a great idea, instead of relying on Google's algorithm 100% to serve the right results, Yahoo in 1994 is employing people to aggregate the content.
Is this because no one can do it as well as google, so we're having to provide different methods?
IF anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers create an account and email me at jason at Mahalo.com and I'll put M$5 in your account to play with. 60 days in where getting fairly good answers to a range of questions.
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I enjoy making bad jokes though so it'll probably happen again. I'll just have to even them out with the occasional thoughtful comment.
In fact this mini thread really isn't meaningful to anyone reviewing the submission anyways, and you should downvote me again.
"So far the tipping results in 2-10x the amount of response... so clearly it works. Give it time! :-)"
In fact, that's the other big secret of why Mahalo Answers is having a fairly strong start: we don't allow obnoxious behavior. If someone responds with "why don't you google it n00b?!!?" we delete the response and warn the person once before closing their account.
We have a "no a-hole" rule basically. I'm going to do an email newsletter about the things we've learned with community building. My email newsletter is at http://www.tinyurl.com/jasonslist if you're interested.
mahalo is the first result, there are other very popular queries where mahalo is on the first page. So they get a bunch of relevant clicks and then they put ads on those pages so surely they must be making decent money.
I doubt they make enough money to cover all of their employees but eventually they can just fire all of their employees and live off of the content revenue for a few years or sell the site to somebody who will.
A successful startup does not always rely on unique and innovative technology, the execution of a consumer "brand experience" can be as equally important. In this case, their IP is human-driven. Google's algorithm is nice but it's not AI yet.
To me, Mahalo completes the yin-yang of search. The concept is not new, human-filtering was around in the 90-00's. Popular algorithms and directories have come and gone. Mahalo is doing the best job of it today.
We are testing different ways of doing this including:
1. hand crafter search results with content 2. a knowledge exchange (Mahalo Answers) 3. how to articles 4. (coming april 10th) 5. (coming September 15th)
The real goal of Mahalo is to build a service that combines the three most important services on the internet: content, search and knowledge exchange.
For an example of this look at our bob dylan page: http://www.mahalo.com/bob_dylan
This page has nice wikipedia/About.com style content on the left, search results and Q&A on the right.
If a normal person (i.e. not a ycombinator/Techcrunch50/Scoble type) comes to a page like this they have a really nice spam-free experience.
We know this because we actually have a lab at Mahalo where we study human behavior on the web. If any of you would like to see this here is a video from before we launched: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoehBwTAH5Y
In these studies we found that folks LOVES our model.