Humans Interupting Algorithms: Wales v. Calacanis on Human Powered Search
Article edit : January 21, 2008 12:30 PM
A large group of international tech rock stars are at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich today and friend of RWW Martin Källström of pre-launch search startup Twingly sent us a rough transcript of a particularly interesting panel this morning.
In this discussion, titled Humans Disrupting Algorithms, WIkipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about his new search engine Wikio, Jason Calacanis talks about his human-powered search service Mahalo and there’s cameos by Google bigwig Marissa Meyer and international man of mystery Michael Arrington. Wikio and Mahalo are taking very different approaches to search. It was an interesting enough conversation that I read it from start to finish and thought readers here might want to as well.
JASON
We are an editorial company at Mahalo and we’ve been around for six months now. Here is an algorithmic search result for apple pie, filled with spam and weird stuff. Martha Stewart is not even here.
One person can pollute the internet with hundreds of thousands of pages in a matter of minutes. And the content…We are not trying to apply humans to any search imaginable. If you look at the long tail of search we are looking at filling the top spots with journalistic search results. Martha Stewart has to compete
with the slime buckets that are filling the web every day.My belief is that for top searches human results will always come out on top. If you look at googles result for “paris hotels” it is filled with crap. Our search looks like this. When was the last time a clean directory was available on the web. Probably 10 years.
