Mahalo
From LIS 460 Summer 2007
Contents |
What is Mahalo?
Mahalo is the first human-powered search engine. Functioning much like a Yahoo directory or About.com, it is powered by staff members called guides, who spend hours searching, filtering out useless results, and developing searches. The guides then organize the search results onto very clear web pages. If a search has not been created, users can request a search be created and it will be made available to all Mahalo users. Mahalo users can also suggested additional resources to the guides and suggested links to be included in search results. Currently, Mahalo is in its Alpha version.
Features of Mahalo
Mahalo has a symbols rating system. When searching through Mahalo, users will see one of the following three symbols next to the links:
1. Warning: A yellow triangle with an exclamation point
a. Warnings are to alert users that the link may have pop-ups, have a large amount of unnecessary advertisements, may require signing up for a membership
b. Hovering over warning symbol will tell users why it is marked with a warning
2. Guide’s Choice: A traditional Hawaiin hand signal
a. Guide’s Choice symbols are to alert the user that this link is a favorite of a guide
b. Hovering over the Guide Choice symbol will tell users which guide recommended the link
3. What’s it: A blue circle with a question mark in it
a. The What’s It symbol is given to links that are not commonly known to users
b. Technorati is labeled with a What’s It symbol
Mahalo has several types of sites that will not be linked from Mahalo. The following list was taken directly from the Mahalo FAQ page:
1. Spam sites
2. Non-spam sites that have deceptive, or overbearing, advertising. For example, Mahalo will not link to blogs that have nothing but ads above the fold, forcing you to scroll down to get to the content. This includes sites that are largely advertorial.
3. Any sites that give the appearance of participating in phishing or any other type of malicious activity ("phishing" being the fraudulent acquisition of sensitive personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity).
4. Sites that simply regurgitate information from other sites with or without giving credit where credit is due. For example, if you have a blog that you use to simply aggregate your favorite posts about gadgets from other, more notable gadget blogs (such as Engadget or Gizmodo)—without adding substantial value and information via your blog—then we will always link directly to the source of the information rather than to your blog.
5. Sites which scrape or re-purpose other people's content without permission. Note: We are not able to police every site we link to, so we will make mistakes. If we're linking to a site which you feel is misappropriating your content please let us know by clicking the "Report" link on the search result page in question.
6. Sites of unknown origin (i.e. we cannot establish who operates the site).
7. Sites which have adult content or hate speech.
Uses of Mahalo in a school library
Mahalo could be a very useful search engine for the School Library Teacher to use when developing curriculum. The searches are already pre-rated, the search results have been reviewed for relevancy to the search subject, the results page layouts are clear and well organized by type. Mahalo makes searching less over whelming and more productive.
Since most of the results listed are for popular news sites, students in popular culture classes could do surveys on how the general population thinks about a topic.
When introducing search tools to students, Mahalo could be useful because it does seem to focus on popular culture and topics which might appeal to students more than some of the other search tools.
Mahalo is interesting for students to look at when they compare their rankings in del.icio.us and StumbleUpon with what other humans may search for them.
For More Information on Mahalo
http://www.mahalo.com/Mahalo_FAQ
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5213
http://www.psfk.com/2007/06/mahalo.html
