Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) owns the index to the world's knowledge. What it isn't good at, however, is telling us which sources are well-written, amusing, or authoritative, especially since a whole industry has evolved to help businesses game the system by pushing their links to the top of the list regardless of appropriateness.

What we net users need is a curator, someone to cull out the crap, spam and marketing spin, leaving only the best answers to our question. This is the role the new search site Mahalo, just launched by internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, intends to provide.

Unlike sites such as Digg, which aggregate visitor opinion to vett interesting web content (and whose results are frequently gamed), Mahalo uses a staff of real human professional guides. These guides take the most popular search terms du jour and compile a prioritized list of resources that best address them.

Obviously, indexing even a small part of all possible search terms by hand is impossible, I asked Calacanis what Mahalo's goals were in this respect. He replied, "We are setting the goal of the top 10,000 terms by the end of the year and the top 25,000 next year." He pointed out that the number of unique search terms used every day is hugely inflated because people frame the same question in so many different ways. "If you come to our iPod or flatpanel TV pages, you don't have to do the 10 secondary searches. That being said, our goal is to do the fat part of the long tail and leave the other 60-90% of the tail to Google--which is why we show Google when we don't have a hand-written page."

Continue reading Former AOL exec Jason Calacanis launches new site, Mahalo

Former AOL exec Jason Calacanis launches new site, Mahalo originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jeffrey Bewkes, president of Time Warner, told his Sports Illustrated magazine division to go take a flying leap when they wanted to partner with AOL's sports channel to build a giant sports web site. Synergies, he told the Wall Street Journal, are bullshit.

As someone who made part of her career not just believing in synergies but putting solid numerical values to them and offering them up, like holy sacraments of PowerPoint, to the strategists at gigantic corporations: this is a hard pill to swallow. And though I see it not working more often than not, I also see so many areas -- yes, within Time Warner, where I work today -- where it does work. Heck, everyday I make my bucks on the back of the synergy.

But instead of calling them "synergies," now, Time Warner is calling them "adjacencies." Sumner Redstone split up Viacom and CBS because the "clout" he was supposed to get from his company's huge size "got us nowhere." Is the day of the synergy over and done with?

Continue reading Synergy at Time Warner: forget it, says Bewkes

Synergy at Time Warner: forget it, says Bewkes originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sat, 03 Jun 2006 14:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Insider Blogging looks at the employees blogs of our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information." And Jason Calacanis, my boss and one of the subjects of today's look inside, loves this feature!

We've quoted Mini-Microsoft, famous for his anonymous look behind the silicon curtain, but it seems that this time will be one of our last (until, Robert Scoble-like, he rises from anonymity and keeps his criticisms to the immaterial). He didn't say we were the reason he stopped blogging -- actually, it's his wife, who he never told about the secretive blog (so she would avoid the stress), or maybe his too-honest talk with Seattle Times reporter Danny Westneat (Mini was "weary," said Danny, and Mini realized: it's true!).

But wait! He's not totally stopped blogging. We're just going to see a mini-Mini-Microsoft from now on. I truly have no idea what that means.

Maybe it was encouragement from Jason Calacanis, the insider blogger who dares to (a) speak his name and (b) criticize his own company. Earlier this week he took AOL Search to task, offering some criticism for "too many ads and too much collateral" that fills the screen. AOL should love its users more than Google, Yahoo! and MSN, he says, but only including one ad before the search results. Jim Kukral gives him some "credit" for his analysis and finally tells him: "good advice."

So which is more valuable: employees who are too stressed to blog critically in secret, or those who boldly take their brethren to task in a web site that bears their own last name? I won't opine, but I will point out that Microsoft was down 50 cents today, to $22.65 (flirting again with a several-year low), whereas Time Warner was down just a penny to $17.21 (comfortably in the middle of its 52-week range).

Insider blogging: Microsoft blogger won't, but AOL blogger will originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 31 May 2006 20:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.