Batman is bummed out because he can't find anything on the Internet. Have no fear, Howstuffworks.com is here! In a recent article in Howstuffworks.com, the search engine Mahalo is explained. Search engines serve as Virgil to the Internet user guiding him or her into the heights of heaven or the depths of Hades. Mahalo, which is Hawaiian for "thank you," is a search engine that does not use any kind of algorithm but rather the recommendations of people. Mahalo employees rank the top websites for the information the user is looking for and the top results appear first. The centralized database is known as The Greenhouse. So does Mahalo really work? To test the full capabilities of Mahalo, we compared its search results with Google, Ask.com, and Yahoo. We decided to search for the term "Batman." The top three results for Google were a website that reviewed the 1989 film, a Wikipedia entry about Batman, and a Wikipedia entry about the 1960s TV show. The Yahoo search's top three were a Wikipedia entry about Batman, the same site from Google reviewing the 1989 Batman film, and the official website of the new Dark Knight movie. Ask.com 's top three results were a site devoted to the 1990s Batman: The Animated Series (my favorite television show ever), a website about Batman's appearances on film, and the official website of Batman. Mahalo's top three were the Wikipedia entry on Batman, Batman's official website, and the official website of the movie Batman Begins. Just for this very small test, Mahalo produced favorable results that reflected excellent content for all things Batman. Maybe people driven search engines are the way to go. I will definitely be using Mahalo more often. Thank you, Mahalo.
Comments (2)
I had just stumbled upon Mahalo the other day via one of my Google searches. I had never heard of it or what it was, but I was intrigued as to how it worked. I think a user sorted database would produce more relative searches, but I think that the massive amount of information available online will make such things impractical in the future. And of course, people can be biased and unreliable when ranking sites.
Posted by Tim Nary | November 17, 2007 1:01 PM
Posted on November 17, 2007 13:01
The Batman Begins movie was actually really kind of badass. It sort of harked back to the Animated Series age and played with a lot more of that time's storylines. It was really dark for a cartoon movie and I think it had to be censored in a couple areas. Make more posts about the Bat plz
Posted by Pat Mulholland | December 14, 2007 2:47 PM
Posted on December 14, 2007 14:47