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 huge 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.