Mahalo after a couple of weeks

OK; so right now I should be con­nect­ing my laptop to work’s VPN and check­ing up on a data­base I’m sup­posed to be dia­gnos­ing. Or, fail­ing that, I should be tidy­ing the flat, taking the rub­bish out, or think­ing about cook­ing my dinner. Or, fail­ing that, I have some server main­ten­ance, home dir­ect­ory house­keep­ing and CD rip­ping that I’m going to have to do even­tu­ally. But I’ve had an arse of a day and I’m feel­ing double-plus-lazy, so I’m going to write some­thing instead. A quick look back in time tells me that I’d prom­ised a second opin­ion on Mahalo once I’d had time to try it out, and since I’ve had time to try it out; here it is.

The first thing to say is that it’s no google, and I’m guess­ing they’re not even going for that market. I’ve found it to be close to use­less for any search I carry out in the course of my work­ing (as a soft­ware engin­eer) day. Past­ing error codes into the search form just throws out a random selec­tion of (usu­ally bio­graph­ical) pages. The google res­ults at the bottom of the page are as good as you’d expect, but they’re slower to load and less obvi­ous on the page than if I’d just used google in the first place. Search­ing for inform­a­tion on unix com­mands leaves it scratch­ing it’s head in bewil­der­ment, and, per­haps more ser­i­ously, even rel­at­ively well known com­puter soft­ware can leave it sim­il­arly speechless.

And it’s not just tech­nical searches, it’s any­thing … overly spe­cific. If I search for “cat lifespan” it gives me a few options for pages about cats, but noth­ing that is obvi­ously going to tell me what I want to know. Google, by com­par­ison, gives me the answer in it’s first link (although it’s second one is to a cor­por­ate web­site.) I guess expect­ing answers to spe­cific ques­tions is just too much to ask of the site’s human index­ing engine.

That use of humans to build the entire index is both Mahalo’s biggest weak­ness and it’s greatest strength, since while I’ve been fairly dis­ap­poin­ted in the breadth of sub­jects it is know­ledge­able on, I’ve been hugely impressed with the qual­ity of the res­ults it does return. It’s hard to describe the joy of enter­ing a search term and having the res­ults come back, free from spam or noise, in a neatly cat­egor­ised list of high qual­ity links. I don’t know, re-reading that last sen­tence makes me wonder if I’m over­re­act­ing to this, but I can’t help it; it just reminds me of what the internet should be; a place where I can get access to inform­a­tion quickly and easily, without having to know the tricks of avoid­ing spam­mers and scam­mers, and without having to trawl through a moun­tain of ‘sponsored links’ or unin­formed twaddle to get to the actual inform­a­tion. Of course, there’s a place for the unin­formed twaddle as well (else I’d have to shut up shop,) but I don’t neces­sar­ily want a whole load of con­spir­acy the­or­ies pol­lut­ing my screen when ‘m trying to research the moon landing.

This leads me to believe that the term “search engine” might be some­thing of a mis­nomer. Cer­tainly, you can search Mahalo, but it’s hardly it’s strongest suit; con­struct­ing a search term for a spe­cific piece of inform­a­tion is rarely sat­is­fact­ory, and that’s what people expect to be able to do with some­thing called a “search engine”; it’s sort-of implied by the name. Where Mahalo really shines, con­versely, is on suf­fi­ciently broad searches for well defined sub­jects (say, ‘Evol­u­tion’, or ‘Egypt’,) in those cases it’s hand-built nature and high qual­ity put me more in mind of an index, or a guide than of a blind search algorithm. It’s like going back to Yahoo in the really old days, but with a somewhat-useful search fea­ture, and links you actu­ally want to follow. I guess there’s value in the term “search engine”; people know what it means, but I can’t help won­der­ing if they might help dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves, as well as com­mu­nic­ate their unique strengths, if they used a dif­fer­ent term.

So, regard­less of what it is, would I recom­mend Mahalo? Yes, abso­lutely, but not unre­servedly. It’s not com­plete yet; that much is pain­fully clear in daily use, and I end up fall­ing through to wiki­pe­diaor google at least as often as I get the answer from Mahalo, and there are types of searches that I don’t think it will ever be any good for (but then, I think there’s an argu­ment for spe­cial­ised search engines for many of those anyway.) For the searches it’s designed to handle, though, I think the value of it is well worth the ini­tial incon­veni­ence of having to con­trib­ute to the index myself. Sug­gest­ing links is quick and easy, and the more people that use it reg­u­larly and add the pages that it didn’t find for them, the sooner it’ll be com­plete and really useful.

So, go on - check it out. If you use fire­fox, you can con­fig­ure it to use Mahalo as the default search engine, if not then it might be a little less con­veni­ent, but I think it’ll be worth the effort.