Mahalo
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Google, Powerset, Cuil | Themes: The Internet
4. Mahalo
Mahalo
www.mahalo.com Strong: For simple queries or general information, it is the best. Weak: If you’re looking to do research on complex topics, you might as well forget about Mahalo.
Mahalo is one of the most prominent human-powered search engines on the Web. It aims to find the 25,000 most common queries that people search for on Google and use the power of human beings to tailor the results and make them as useful and relevant as possible.
But in the process, the opportunity for complex queries is all but eliminated, and if you’re looking for a full-featured search engine, you won’t find it here.
The result of a simple query like “dog” is fantastic when you use Mahalo. It provides you with a list of highly relevant search results and even offers some fast facts, videos and trivia. For those who seek the most relevant results for a relatively common topic, Mahalo is the best place to start. That said, it failed to include “Tom’s Guide” in its search results. In those (frequent) instances when Mahalo offers no human-edited results, the site brings you to a page that displays the results from major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Ask.com. It’s a nice feature, but if I can retrieve results from Google, I don’t see any reason to use Mahalo.
For more complex queries, you might as well forget about Mahalo altogether. Sure, you can still be brought to the page displaying all search engine results, but if you prefer Google already, there’s no reason to explore this page when you’re looking for something that may be tougher to find than “dog” or “Don Reisinger” (I couldn’t resist the vanity search).
Mahalo is useful for simple queries or those that are specifically targeted at a particular subject or topic, but it is equally useless for complex queries and those that require more thought. And although that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re willing to make Mahalo a secondary choice, it won’t replace Google or Yahoo anytime soon.
Heya,
Seeing as how google works perfectly fine, has gmail, already searches through all the same things and has a simple powerful interface as well as igoogle for customization, I'm not really certain why any article should ever be called `should we ditch google' as if something were wrong with it.
The title is more like something I'd expect surrounding a microsoft product. Not google.
And I'm not a google fan boy, I'm just random internet user number 7 billion and think it's great to have alternatives, but there's no reason to make a slandery type of title to introduce it.
Very best,
That's a great point
'it's great to have alternatives, but there's no reason to make a slandery type of title to introduce it.'
I am soo with you malveaux!! Google kicks ass period. ditch microsoft Office should be the story for google docs!!!! WOOT WOOT !! New and good article! Yes, you may take my idea TH!! hehe
This clusty thing seems alright, I'll admit I like the filter menu on the left-hand side which groups sites into subject categories.
I've tried a multitude of searches, the top 10 correspond similar to those of google, and the search is equally as fast. Overall I'd say they're comparable, not enough to drop Google like a sack of potatoes though.
Over all it seems to be a worthy alternative, much more worthy than quoole or quile, or whatever the heck that last site was, I can't even remember the name correctly, horrible top 10 hits, and horrid search times.
Cuil* its at the top of this article even
Right now nothing is better than Google.
Almost and as good as don't cut it.
By the way what Toms article leaves out the conclusion?
It's easier to read the comments than the article.
Speaking of dumping MS Office, done that. I now use Open Office, it works great.
Thanks for the Powerset mention. You might want to also check out the republished Wikipedia pages (click through on any of the links and notice that we republish that page). We have lots of enhancements on that page to make your experience better. Maybe you should do a follow up article with companies trying to innovate on the Wikipedia experience, though certainly not with the intention of getting people to "ditch" Wikipedia =)
-mark, powerset product manager
you forgot google.com you you you....wont say it.
Searches tried:
UL, UL 790 (an engineering standard), venture bros season 3 torrent, cello music, tomshardware
each of these is reflected in my comment below.
clusty has some interesting things that google doesn't. However, it is not that accurate. I dont' know what searches you've done but I've done everything from generic to politically sensitive issues and found far more accurate results on google.
Cuil, is completely useless and the amount of results is a lie/often overstated. They will take 1 result and turn it into "1500" somehow by counting every image and link on a website as another result for the same website. You can't get more than 50 pages deep on cuil, it simply won't let you. Whoops! I think the total results is probably in the realm of 200 thousand.
Kartoo, won't even work without flash enabled. I refuse to play into the need for javascript or flash just to do a damn search. It is a text based search we are doing.
Mahalo is so inaccurate it's retarded. I get like 6 results for stuff, but it does give me the option to "Create" the page, whatever that means. As you editors admitted yourself, it's useless.
Powerset apparently can't do in detail specific topics that google covers well such as UL 790 and venture bros, you just see nothing. Let's go with "Crap, yet again".
Trexy has an interesting idea, but it needs refining. No valid/successful results, though.
Wikia crawls google and yahoo. Also needs java to run. remind me again why we HAVE to have java for search? Results were horribly inaccurate too.
Honestly guys, whatever drugs you are smoking when you write your ridiculously positive reviews please share them as I would like to have some of it too.
/opinions my own, not my companies, yadda
I ran Nexplore once. It was so fancy that I could do 5 google searches in the time it took to load one page of results. And this is without trying to customise anything.
Google is pretty boring, but it's fast, and in the end that matters most to me.
The clusty.com site doesn't work anymore? Quite odd or funny?
The clusty.com site doesn't work anymore? Quite odd or funny?
Works for me.
"clusty has some interesting things that google doesn't. However, it is not that accurate. I dont' know what searches you've done but I've done everything from generic to politically sensitive issues and found far more accurate results on google."
I've used this "clusty" when it was still vivisimo.com. I find the exact opposite. The searches are generally more relevant than anything google.com presents.
There is a good reason to try alternatives... In case you hadn't noticed, competition benefits the end-user... unless you juist want to be google sheep? That being said, yes google is the best and I enjoy using it but I will give it a rest on the very moment I discover something that is AT LEAST as good. They are raking in WAY to much money and they're spending habits are ATTROCIOUS. They need to have the user-base taken away to start appreciating it again. IMO.
PS, if you think ditch makes the title slanderous, you have problems...
IMO.PS, if you think ditch makes the title slanderous, you have problems...
+1 and yes lets just lets make sure Google has no competition at the same time!!
Bob
I gave up google 2-3 months after it hit the web simply because it is anti-1st, 2nd amendment, anti-American, & out to try and do what MSFT has been unable to do: control all net traffic/info. Plus it's fascist to the core & it plainly telegraphs that it is evil. It's got its claws in pretty good now. As for search: botbot, Copernic [since the web began darn near & on your desktop], Mamma, Highway 66, & Beaucoup to name just a few. Clusty doesn't seem too bad.
I gave up google 2-3 months after it hit the web simply because it is anti-1st, 2nd amendment, anti-American, & out to try and do what MSFT has been unable to do: control all net traffic/info. Plus it's fascist to the core & it plainly telegraphs that it is evil. It's got its claws in pretty good now. As for search: botbot, Copernic [since the web began darn near & on your desktop], Mamma, Highway 66, & Beaucoup to name just a few. Clusty doesn't seem too bad.
I really hope you are joking....
this is all i get for clusty.com:
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.
Hell ya! More competition is better for the end-users. Clusty will keep those Google dudes stay competitive with a better search and perhaps pop the ridiculous stock price buble that Wall Street hyped up to draw in the suckers for quick cash.
www.yahoo.com use a real search engine.
"Clusty is perhaps Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google ’s most worthy competitor."
Can't say I agree as I have heard of plenty of search engines, but sadly, not this one.
Hey kami3k!, Kuni Lemmel isn't joking...all (his?) statements are true and backed up in fact. Google is a leftist/socialist enterprise...which is ironic since they use capitalism to try and further their restrictive socialist agenda...only in America!
wonder if you can 'google' the die-hard liberal owner's biases?
...I bet they're buds with "Ben&Jerry's"...lol