The DLD conference was yesterday and it was held in Munich. The highlight of the event (Thanks TechCrunch) was a session called “Humans Disrupting Algorithms,” in which David Kirkpatrick of Fortune spoke with Jimmy Wales and Jason Calacanis. Jimmy has developed a beta of Wikia Search, whereas Jason Calacanis has been running Mahalo for a few months now. Jason said “60% of people are not happy with search results, up from 50% last year.” Both of these search engines are operated by humans. The 60 employees who run Mahalo are paid, whereas the people running Wikia are not. The idea with the creation of both is to eliminate the “pollution” that Google has because of people who develop thousands of websites for SEO advantages.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3TKktZZbI]
Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience.
“The problem isn’t with the searching process, it’s with the result. You can’t do the fat If you read Chris Anderson, the real value is in the long tail. So if I did a startup I would do something else. I would do a Facebook.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gL4cg-vIQY]
My opinion
I don’t see Google losing market share, but it do see a percentage of the people who traditionally use Google switching to these other services when they are in search of more “hard results.” You can’t search for your name in Mahalo unless you’re a celebrity or someone recommends a link to your site. Whatever happens, your going to start having to perform maintenance on these other sites just in case.
Do you think that search engines should be human operated or by Google’s PageRank algorithm?
