“Mahalo To Curate Web Search”

Those terms should be in the neighborhood of 10,000 by the end of 2007, Mahalo noted in a statement about their debut as an alpha test of the service. Calacanis opened his blog post about Mahalo with 32 straight ‘Alphas’.

"Mahalo.com is in ALPHA–that means not ready for users, but looking for feedback," he wrote.

We’ve seen human-powered search before, notably with PreFound, which taps its userbase to recommend the best results for queries. Mahalo employs editors directly, and Danny Sullivan reminds us that Ask Jeeves once worked this way too.

At first glance, Mahalo looks like a Hawaiian-themed Yahoo, circa 1997, with its two-column layout of categories. Doing a query for one of the terms they have indexed, like Star Wars, returns results starting with The Mahalo Top 7 for it.

Icons may appear next to certain results. The thumb-and-pinky icon indicates a Guide’s Choice, while a yellow triangle with an exclamation point is a warning about the destination, like a site having pop-ups.

Once Mahalo hits its 10,000 search terms, it will enter its beta phase and formally launch shortly thereafter.

It took a couple of years for PreFound to get its hyperlink patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office. Once they got the patent, it became part of what has been nearly a year-long discussion with Google over the engineering work both companies do.

PreFound CEO Steve Mansfield told WebProNews in a phone interview that they and Google seemed to be doing similar things, among them work related to PreFound’s recent hyperlinking patent. He believes Google Notebook in particular infringes the newly granted patent.

Though Google and PreFound have been talking productively, Mansfield said that prior to their legal action, "the feeling was there wasn’t going to be any more talking." Since the filing, the two sides have been making greater progress in their discussions, and Mansfield said he is "very optimistic" they and Google can reach an accord.

PreFound sued Google over the patent the same day it was issued, Steve Bryant said at eWeek’s Google Watch. The patent covers "Method for adding a user selectable function to a hyperlink," and affects what happens when a cursor is held over a hyperlink for a given period of time. From the abstract (bullets added):

Examples of link enhancement include, but are not limited to,

• opening the selected link in a new window;
• opening the selected link in a new window with that window minimized;
• creating a clickable graphic/text string, and/or icon that would enable the user to return to the selected link at a later time;
• or anchor the current page by creating an icon or other clickable item that would return the user to the current page;
• or view off-line which would, in the background download the files associated with the selected link to a memory device for viewing later off-line.

According to Mansfield, there is more to the patent than what is available by simply right-clicking a link for a menu of options. If the functionality is intrinsic to Google Notebook, that would seem to prove him correct.

Enhanced Site Personalization

As a part of the new interface changes, PreFound has added an enhanced method for personalizing and more finely narrowing search results. Building on the company’s Social Search Equalizer, PreFound has added the ability for users to quickly adjust specific interest areas that help to deliver the most targeted search results.

More Diverse Search Results

Also included in the new version of the PreFound site is a new search results page that adds to PreFound’s unique user shared search results by including Google search results as well as a Wikipedia reference result for the search topic

Easier Method for Adding Content

The new “bookmarklet” can be easily added to a Web browser’s “favorites” list and allows users to quickly submit the Web page they are on to a PreFound group by simply clicking on the bookmarklet from their favorites menu.

The changes significantly enhance PreFound’s alternative to traditional computer algorithm-based search results that aim to deliver more relevant results that are based on the previous searches that people have done and the sites they have found useful.

With personalization being such a hot topic these days I think PreFound is headed in the right direction by putting the power into the hands of the users.

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It’s a chicken-and-egg issue for PreFound CEO Steve Mansfield. He’s been lauded for the HydraLinks technology he and his company, iLor, previously developed.

The critical acclaim needs to be matched with popular acceptance, now that iLor has positioned its PreFound site for greater success. PreFound concept of search means the more user contributions it has, the better results will be for those users. Expanding the site’s index requires attracting active users who want to participate.

Mansfield told WebProNews in a phone chat that they want to continue building PreFound’s usership. The relaunch that just came online updates the look and feel of PreFound, the way users can navigate through it.

They have improved the tag-based search, by building what Mansfield called a ‘collaborative vocabulary’ based on user input. Personalization of search can be tweaked with their ‘Include Your Interests’ tool, available to registered users.

People can set three areas of interest, with three keywords for each area. Also, the option to find local results from Google can be enhanced by providing city, state, and zip code information in one’s personal profile.

Once personal areas of interest have been set up in the personal profile, using them in search takes place through choosing to include them, then adjusting the weight of each area by changing the slider controls for each one. The setting affect how the results appear.

If an authoritative result for a search resides on Wikipedia, it will appear at the top of the search results page. User Shared results appear next; if the PreFound algorithm thinks some of those results may not be optimal for the query, it will invite the searcher to create a group on PreFound about the query to improve the results.

No one goes away without some kind of answer. Below the Wikipedia and User Shared section, results from Google appear and add more options for the searcher.

Mansfield’s rationale for personalization comes from the growth of social networking. "Search specialization seem to be antiquated," he said, noting how so many people have their interests served by the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world.

That focus may be served best if PreFound can find a dance partner at the networking social. The technology seems tailor-made to work with an existing social networking presence. A partnership would go a long way toward boosting the quality and quantity of the results PreFound can deliver at a personalized level.

PreFound and its CEO, Steve Mansfield, approach the issue of organizing content from a tag-based perspective. They have implemented a way to perform automatic tagging of links or groups in the PreFound site from that shared collabulary.

The method simplifies the tagging approach, which PreFound claimed is affected in a negative way by how people tag their content now:

PreFound has an interesting viewpoint on tagging. They consider using a word from the title of a page as a tag to be very important, but in their observation most people don’t do this.

As the site’s engine crawls pages to be tagged by users, it pre-tags the links “with keywords that are consistent and relate to a consistent taxonomy.” PreFound users can edit these choices for accuracy, but the company feels this approach will lead to better tagging of content.

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Derby Day Gets Social Network Treatment

On Friday, May 5th, PreFound CEO and co-founder Steve Mansfield will host a Roundtable discussion called “Extending On-line Social Communities into Pure Search.”

Mena and Ben Trott, co-founders of Six Apart, will join Mansfield for the discussion. Journalists Bambi Francisco (MarketWatch) and Jessica Vascellaro (Wall Street Journal) will attend in person, while Washington Post e-commerce and Internet writer Leslie Walker will take part by teleconference.

Search Engine Lowdown managing editor Garrett French, who recently joined Search Engine Journal’s columnist ranks, will act as moderator in a sort-of-homecoming for the former WebProNews writer.

Mansfield further described the focus of the Kentucky Derby Roundtable on the PreFound website:

The Roundtable begins at 7 pm in Lexington; the venue was not known at press time.

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When I first chatted with PreFound and iLor CEO Steve Mansfield in early February about the new website, we touched on the whole “chicken or the egg” situation facing PreFound.

To draw users, PreFound needs content. To get content, PreFound needs users. It’s not an impossible challenge; witness the success of Digg and Delicious in going from simple concepts to destinations that get the attention of the major news media.

PreFound has decided to expand the revenue model from the Featured Finders program for topic experts to all of PreFound’s users. Once PreFound Finders have shared 151 or more Find Groups, those Finders receive 100 percent of the Google AdSense revenue generated from their User Pages.

When they share over 300 groups, Finders receive 100 percent of the ad revenue from their User and Group pages. Featured Finders receive the same percentage of ad revenue for their User and Group pages as well.

Early movers at PreFound who scour the site diligently can accumulate sharing ranks quickly. PreFound announced the “Make This Group Your Own” program. Users can claim any search results marked as “PreFound Preloaded,” make revisions to the group, and the group then belongs to that user.

“We want to bring regular users into the part of the Internet where they can take advantage of its commercial aspects,” said Mansfield. “We’re offering a platform for commercial participation.”

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Steve Mansfield’s PreFound search engine aims at improving search results by having users “pre-find” them for searchers who follow. To help overcome the “chicken and egg” issue a site has when it depends on user contributions to content, PreFound now offers to pay its Featured Finder users to search and bolster its index.

The company described in a statement how Google fits in to the Featured Finder picture, and why PreFound will try out paying for content, albeit indirectly:

PreFound also has some improvements planned for launch this week. Users will be able to import bookmark lists from Del.icio.us, with support for importing Yahoo! My Web 2.0 and Furl coming later.

Offering inducements to searchers became a topic of interest last year, when Bill Gates told a British publication that search engines might have to start paying their users. His MSN Search division just launched a promotion where it will reward searchers with prizes over a three-month period.

Yahoo has launched a trial balloon, contacting Yahoo Mail users about the types of incentives they might want in exchange for using a Yahoo search rewards toolbar. Among those incentives: frequent flier miles, Netflix discounts, and Yahoo Mail service upgrades.

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PreFound’s “Featured Finders” will benefit from the international exposure as domain experts as well as receive 100% of the advertising revenue that their individual pages generate.

More details via the press release.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

People do better at finding topics relevant to questions. Even Google, for all its engineering skill and algorithmic power, doesn’t know guitars from fish when someone types “bass” into its search box. Humans do, though, which is good because people can’t tune a piano like they can tuna fish.

The users who deliver results to Prefound make the experience that much better for the next searcher who comes along. Currently, Prefound requires users to download its PFfinder toolkit to save links and categorize them.

Once finished, users can upload their links back to Prefound’s index. Once there, they become part of the social search environment that has become very popular, through the use of sites like Delicious.

Prefound co-founder Steve Mansfield addressed the topic of ease-of-use for me during a recent talk. I asked about other options for getting information into Prefound, such as bookmarklets instead of a downloaded tool.

He noted that the company was working on other options for getting information into the Prefound index. But the first issue that Prefound has to address is a “chicken and egg” situation; they need users to build that content, but how to draw the users?

Mansfield said he recognized Prefound needs to earn the trust of users, and thinks that the updates they have planned will go a long way to bringing new users to the service. There are a lot of users who don’t occupy the hardcore techie demographic that Mansfield thinks dominates the tagging/bookmarking space now.

Results from queries to Prefound do pass the relevance test. I try to toss a couple of fringe topics at new sites just to see how they handle them. Prefound did list relevant links at the top of search results for musician Junior Wells and a superhero roleplaying game called Mutants and Masterminds.

If Prefound can build some buzz and grow its userbase, especially with the challenge presented by competing services like Yahoo! Answers, it stands a chance of making its mark online. The challenge for Mansfield and company will be to get that growth going quickly.

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