First, I apologize for letting your comment slip into the spam filter — I pulled it out just in the nick of time!

You wrote:

If Mahalo gets real popular, I mean google popular, then it will effectively feed back into google’s results anyway. A link from a Mahalo page will then be so powerful in google as to effectively make the google results the same as Mahalo. So, in effect, if Mahalo works then google will effectively “copy” it. That’s the way the google algo works!

Excellent point! The value of that is that Google’s results will then become more valuable. One of my majr complaints with Google is the mish-mash of results one can get on certain search terms because of gaming and black-hat SEO.

but that will only work for really general keywords.

when your daughter has to find.
the reason why the interest rates have raised due to blabla … she will still need another SE.

once you know what you want mahalo for, I guess it’s a good tool

Welcome. Your point is well taken; however, I don’t see how making searches more efficient is somehow robbing her of the ability to learn to sift through data. Keep in mind that before she used Mahalo, she’d already done the Google search. Some of the unfortunate results of searching a topic as wide as Steve Jobs and Apple via Google are: a) redundant and/or irrelevant results; and b) the possibility of landing on a spam site or worse.

Mahalo, by the way, does link out to other searches, but they are much more focused.

I’m not saying that Mahalo is for everyone. However, in situations where you are in a time constraint or where the user isn’t particularly search-savvy (like my mother-in-law, for example) and because they’re not savvy, they’re likely to end up on an unreliable or even malevolent site, I’d steer them toward Mahalo any day.

In my daughter’s case, she’s definitely wielded the “google pencil”. For her the issue was managing her time efficiently for the purpose of locating primary sources that she’d already identified as necessary to her paper via Google/Wikipedia searches.

Search on Steve Jobs keynote, for example, and you’ll get a zillion links to the most recent keynote. Narrow it down by year and there’s still a zillion. The point is to focus the search to a pinpoint.

In the long run, the lesson I’d most like her to learn is how to get her work done efficiently, meet deadlines, and have a high degree of confidence in the product she’s created.

Mahalo helped with that. It’s not for everyone and probably not even her most of the time, but it served its purpose and illustrated its usefulness to me.

Note that I’m not arguing against the usefulness of Mahalo. This particular situation seems to me to be analogous to using a calculator only after you’ve learned how to do it with a pencil.

Nit-picky? yeah, I admit that…

If Mahalo gets real popular, I mean google popular, then it will effectively feed back into google’s results anyway. A link from a Mahalo page will then be so powerful in google as to effectively make the google results the same as Mahalo. So, in effect, if Mahalo works then google will effectively “copy” it. That’s the way the google algo works!

Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. And funny you should mention DOS…I had to go hunt for a DOS print command the other day — something that I used to be able to do right off the top of my head.

The challenge for Mahalo will be keeping the pages fresh — it’s definitely a people-intensive thing, but if they can, they’ve got a terrific product.

It’s like going from MS-DOS to MacOS. I’ve been there. It’s a totally different experience and really irks the geeks who are beholden to the more difficult way of doing things.