Mahalo Still Sucks

First, the big news: Jason Calcanis has retired from blogging. To those on the west coast, this is big news. Those of us on the east coast or midwest simply just don’t care.

While reading his announcement though, I saw the mahalo search box next to it. So I typed in a few queries. One of the ones I did was “send a text message”

The results just don’t suck, they double plus suck.

Let’s take a look:

#1: How to make a signature in Gmail
#2: How to m ake an ecard.
#3: Yahoo mail tips
#4: Send your Christmas Cards From Bethlehem
#5: How to use Twitter
#6: Amazon Textbuyit
#7: How to use Flickr
#8: Elizabeth Shoaf

#9 is a result from google called “send a text message”

and #10 is my former site (txt2day) that allows the sending of text messages.

So, the first 8 results (and everything shown above the fold) is completely useless crap that’s not related to my search.

The only relevant results here are pulled in from Google.

Why would anybody use this? It seems like they’d be better served just showing Google results and plastering the top half of the page with ads instead.

Sure, there’s a nice page for Calcanis - but nothing I couldn’t have gotten off of wikipedia.

On the flipside, Mahalo hasn’t heard of me - instead asking if I mean’t “Stan Jones” and showing me results for “Lakisha Jones”

I may not be the most popular “Ryan Jones” but at least Google shows me in the first page.

July 14th, 2008