Mahalo Fail
Today while doing some research into an upcoming post on the human-powered search engine Mahalo and as I was comparing search terms and results between that of Mahalo and Google I ran into an issue that can only be described as a Mahalo Fail. I was using Firefox 3.1 with the Mahalo Share 1.4 plugin (shows Mahalo Notes where the Google Ads would typically be displayed) installed and searching on Google using the term oilers (my favourite hockey team) the Mahalo notes page that came up was for the Flames. As any hockey fan knows the Flames is the divisional and geographical rivals of the Oilers making the Mahalo Notes display the exacto of actual information I was searching for. What’s Mahalos next trick? Will searching for heaven in Google result in the Mahalo notes displaying Hell?
To be fair I actually do like Mahalo and when searching for oilers directly within the Mahalo site it did return relavant results relating the the Oilers hockey team. But if Mahalo wants users to install and use not only their Firefox plugin but their search engine as well mistakes like this must not happen as it shows that a human powered search is simply no match for the mighty Google search algorithms.