July 17, 2007
Mahalo on All Things D
I just watched an interview by Kara Swisher, Boomtown, of Jason Calacanis of Mahalo on the All Things D website.
For the life of me I still don’t see how Mahalo will scale. Yahoo!’s original directory started off with a team of Surfers (editors) who created and organized and ontology. Yahoo! ended up decommissioning the directory because it didn’t scale. Yahoo! was overwhelmed by the number of submissions.
Fast forward to what eventually became Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ) which eventually amassed over 70,000 editors. The current DMOZ is rife with SPAM, dead links, neglect, and accusations of graft.
Other things such as Social Bookmarking (i.e. Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc) have shown problems as well due to the lack of depth.
Mahalo, to me, is more like Answers.com than a competitor to Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft’s search engines.
The bottom line is the Internet, growing at an exponential rate, just can’t scale with linear approaches to organize the information. One must employ algorithmic techniques that can scale with the growth of information on the web and understand concepts from a fundamental relationship level.
Filed by SWong at 8:40 pm under Uncategorized
1 Comment
Mahalo for thinking of Mahalo,
Regarding scale I think the first question you have to ask yourself is do we need to scale. What if human’s powered the top 1/3rd of search and machines did the next 2/3rds… would that be valuable enough? Search is a very, very big market and making the top 1/3rd of searches 5-10x better might be enough… no?
best,
Jason