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.

I’ve just been pointed at Mahalo (thanks Phil,) a new search engine. What sets it aside from the mainstream engines, is that it’s maintained by humans, rather than robots. Obviously, that raises concerns about it’s completeness, but it also means that you can trust its results not to be SEO-spam. In my limited testing, I’ve found it very good, with nicely presented, categorised and, most importantly, relevant results. It also provides results from the major robot-backed engines as well, in case they don’t have what you need indexed yet.

I doubt it’s going to unseat google any time soon, but I’m going to trial using it as my search engine of choice for a week or so, and see how it goes. I’ll report back when I’ve actually used it in anger.

My employer has just launched the open beta of a new website called locatetv. It’s not something I’ve worked on, but I sit next to (and regularly drink with) some of the guys that do. I think it’s a pretty cool site, and encourage anyone with an interesting TV to check it out.

The general idea is that you type in the name of a TV-Show (either the series name, or a specific episode title,) movie or cast member, and the site searches TV listings local to you and shows you a list of the next few times you’ll be able to see what you searched for on TV. That’s pretty cool in itself; it’s a bit more targeted than the numerous TV-guide style websites out there, and the site itself is lightweight and fast to use, so it’s a lot less painful than (say) the Radio Times site.

The really neat feature, though, is the embeds. Designed pretty much specifically for bloggers these allow you to embed a small applet in your own site that links to a specific show or movie or actor. That means that, for example, if I want to talk about a specific episode of Heroes (let’s say Godsend), I can stick this on the site:

That box is generated every time this page is viewed, so it always has up to date (and local to the reader) schedule information in it. In a TV themed blog that would be an extremely useful tool. It means that users who didn’t watch a show, but have their interest piqued by the post find out automatically when they can next catch it (rather than just being told when it was on – maybe in another country,) which in turn increases the chances that they’ll be back to comment on the post, and be more likely to revisit that blog in future since it provides useful information. It makes the reader’s life easier, and generates more traffic and comments for the blog: Everyone’s a winner.

Of course, I don’t often blog about TV, so it’s probably not the most useful tool in the world to me, but there are a lot of sites that would really benefit from this sort of thing and I’d love to see it succeed.

There’s a new blog over that ScienceBlogs that’s already really impressed me. It’s a zoology news blog called Zooillogix, and it’s great; every entry I’ve read to date has been interesting, and often laugh-out-loud funny as well. Those Bleiman Brothers sure are good writers; go and check them out.

This is a good one; a free, legal, online streaming site that lets you pick the songs you want to listen to.

Back in the mists of time, when I was a teenager in the early-nineties, who’d never so much heard of the internet, I had this idea for the future of music. My idea was that you’d have a mobile player that used a more advanced version of mobile phone technology to stream music from some central server somewhere - possibly with the ability to store some amount of it locally, if you thought you were going out of range of the broadcast. The key thing I envisioned was that you’d pay a reasonable, monthly subscription – say about the cost of a CD or two – for access to the music database. Everyone was a winner; consumers got access to all the music they could want, the electronics producers could sell you ever more advanced players, and the music prodiction companies still got the CD or two a month’s money out of everyone without ever having to manufacture so much as a single physical item.

Of course, looking back now, I was hopelessly off on the way technology would develop; storage technology has far outstripped broadcast, such that it’s more feasible for people to carry all the music they could possibly want to listen to with them than it would be for even a modest number of people to tirelessly stream even low-bit-rate music over the cellular network. But I do still believe that the subscription model for music access is the way to go, for the same reasons I stated above. Of course the music industry doesn’t want to play that game; they want to charge us for every track we want listen to, and if they can get away with it, charge us every time we listen to it as well. There’s a whole discussion about the morality of that and whether it’s practical, but it’s been played out all over the internet countless times, and I don’t want to get into it here. The point is that Deezer seem to be offering that subscription service, and for free as well! I can’t stress enough how cool I think this is.

The site isn’t perfect yet, but it’s good. Their track list is extensive, but there are plenty of tracks I might want to listen to that they don’t have yet, and the streaming quality is good enough for headphones at work, but I wouldn’t pipe it through my hi-fi at home. Other than that it’s pretty much what I’d ask for, the tracks keep playing while you navigate the site, it has workable integrated playlist management and there aren’t huger stuttery “buffering” pauses. It’s a good site that I can see myself using, and I really hope they succeed.

Which is rather the point; I’m just not sure that their business model is going to work - they’re planning to pay for the whole thing with revenue from ads. I guess they’ve run the numbers and think it’s going to fly, but it just seems like the recording industry would demand more money for this sort of thing than ads alone can generate, Maybe I’m wrong, and if they can make it work, then more power to them. Everyone go and check it out. Also, remember, if you give their ads a click they probably make more money than if you just look at them, and that helps them raise the cash to keep the site going.

I honestly have no idea what to make of this.