Looks like a bunch of homeo­pathy sup­port­ers have got sick of not being taken ser­i­ously on the inter­net, and decided that the best way to gain the respect of the wider com­munity is to spam wiki­pe­dia until the ser­vice is over­loaded. I’m not sure whether the intent is just a DoS, or if they think people will just get so tired of revert­ing their edits that they just roll over and let them have their say. Either way, it’s a stu­pid plan; the abso­lute most they’ll achieve is that the pages they tar­get will be locked until they them­selves get bored and go away.

In any case, I won­der if the irony of the whole idea is lost on them? Surely the homeo­pathic way to do this would be to have one per­son say, very very quietly, what they want on the page, while in the same room as someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who is a Wiki­pe­dia user.

Hat tip to @xtaldave for the link.

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.