There's a big battle a'brewing in the online search sector (check this video), as new human-powered "social search" networks are rising up against the machines (meaning Google/Yahoo!/Ask/Live/etc.). I recently wrote about the neo-natal state of Jimmy Wales' new search venture, Wikia Search, and gave my assessment that it shows great potential but there is still a lot of work to do before it can be a real competitor to the bot-powered behemoths like Google and Yahoo! (not to mention Microsoft's Live search). Since then I've also been testing out Jason Calacanis' people-powered search site, Mahalo.

The main difference between Wikia and Mahalo is that Wikia's results are culled by volunteers, whereas Mahalo's "editors" are paid to assemble search results by hand based on user requests. In essence, the Mahalo model is very enterprising. Mahalo has a program called the Mahalo Greenhouse which acts as a sort of brokerage for getting top-requested search-results pages built by its members. Topics that need results pages built are listed by vertical teams, such as Geography, and each team has a list of pages that need building with a price that will be paid for creation of that page, ranked by priority (and presumably based on popularity). So to use the Geography list as an example, there are roughly 50 countries on the "Most Wanted List", for which "Serbia" will net you $12 but "Angola" will only get you $10. Other search terms may pay as little as $1, but hey, it beats working for free (which is Wikia's model).

So how do these social search engines fare when compared to the algorithm-based engines? Well, honestly they have a lot of work to do, but they definitely show promise. The biggest advantage is that every link has supposedly been verified and vetted by an actual human. This should weed out the spam-link sites or otherwise unrelated results that can pollute a machine-compiled results page. For example, a search for the term "paris hilton" reveals some interesting differences. I chose this term specifically because it could mean more than one thing. I could be searching for a Hilton hotel in Paris, or I could be searching for info on the celebrity. I don't expect the search engine to know which one I meant, so the results could go either way.

So let's see how the humans fared vs the algorithms...

Wikia: First off, Wikia asks "Are you looking for Paris Hilton (the celebrity) (edit) or the Hilton Hotel chain (create)?" above the results. Good question! Alas, it would appear that there are currently no results compiled for the Hilton hotel chain, so I would have to either move along to another search engine or roll up my sleeves and pitch in. So let's assume I was actually looking for information on the celebrity. What follows is a listing of links which may not please the heiress in question. The number one result is for a site called "Parishiltonsbutt.com", a site promising wallpapers and screensavers, but loaded with Adultfriendfinder ads. Oooh boy. Result #2 points to a latin site called "Entretienes.com" which has some text and links to videos. Better, but I can't read Spanish. #3 goes to Celebsmarts.com, a dodgy site that displayed a bunch of SQL warnings and errors on the main page, and #4 supposedly goes to "Parishiltonsex.org" except there's nothing there. Rounding out the top-5 is a link to a German site called "Real-fans.de" which had a bunch of text (in German) and some photos, and lots of ads. Ooookay... so this is what the Wikia community has put together for anyone who wants to learn more about Paris Hilton (the celebrity). But to be fair, they are only in "alpha" right now, and have the following explanation on their site:

Wikia's search engine
concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users
acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before
we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad.
But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please
bookmark the site and return often.

So we'll have to come back later (maybe months not weeks later) to give Wikia another chance. In the meantime, on to the next round!

Mahalo: Similar to Wikia, the first thing at the top of the results page is a question, followed by some interesting suggestions...

Did you mean: Paris Hotels?
Also try: Paris Hilton's Inheritance
Also try: Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Also try: William Barron Hilton I
Also try: Paris Hilton Lap Dance

Hmmm... there's a related search for "Paris Hilton Lap Dance"??? At first I'm a bit worried. Fortunately, the rest of the page is very well laid out. Note that it too assumes I was searching for the celebrity. First of all, there is a "Mahalo Top 7" which lists in order, the Official Paris Hilton Website, the Paris Hilton Wikipedia page, the Paris Hilton Channel on Youtube, her IMDB page, a TMZ page, a video called "Paris Surrenders", and finally a Google News page that compiles published articles on Paris Hilton. Wow, great links! To the right of the Top 7 is a little block called "Guide Note" which contains some basic information about Paris Hilton, including some "Fast Facts". Brilliant! From there, moving down the page, after some strategically-injected Google Ads, come several sections that group related content-types: Paris Hilton News, Paris Hilton Photos, ...Videos, ...Gossip, ...Culture (?!?), ...Biographies and Profiles, ...Timeline, ...Merchandise (!!!), ...Satire and Humor, Related Searches, and finally, User Recommended Links. Daaaamn. It's all there, on one page, with links that all go to useful information (relatively speaking of course). Score 1 for Mahalo.

Google: The mighty Goog is backed into a corner, but not ready to give up yet. In fact, Google has been making some updates recently and they appear in the results for this challenge. Calling it Universal Search, Google's results are no longer confined to URL links, and may include other content-types like images (from their Image Search engine) and videos (from either YouTube or Google Video), as well as news (from Google News) and locations (from Google Local/Maps), and even blogs (from, you guessed it, Google Blog Search). This is otherwise known as "vertical search" and it holds great promise as it harvests the results of multiple search engines for a single query. This is something of a work in progress however, so let's see how it's coming along.

At the top of the results page are "Image results for Paris Hilton". No sign of a hotel anywhere in the displayed thumbnails. Then come the traditional "organic" search results, starting with Wikipedia at #1, the Official Paris Hilton website at #2, the IMDB page at #3 (as well as a page specifically about the "One Night In Paris" video, at #4), the ParisHiltonZone.com website comes in at #5, and the AskMen.com page on Paris Hilton ranks #6. The #7 link goes to the Paris Hilton MySpace page, but the #8 link actually points to the Hilton Paris hotel. Oh right! Almost forgot about that. ;) Rounding out the top 10 are links to the ParisHiltonRecord.com site (she put out a CD called "Paris" with mixed reviews), and finally, another fan site called Parishiltononline.net. After these 10 results comes another new feature for Google, "Searches related to:..." which has a bunch of other suggested searches like "paris hilton gossip" and "paris hilton movie", and for some reason also includes "pamela anderson". Ooohkayy. But on the whole, the first page of results is of fairly high quality, especially considering it pulled a total of 53,900,000 results from its database. Yikes.

Conclusion: based on the above search results, it looks like there may indeed be a sweet spot in the search market for Mahalo, provided enough people find out about it. For searches that don't have results pages built, they actually fall back on results from all the major search engines, including Google (they consider themselves to be a Google partner since they display Google Ads in their results), Yahoo!, Live, Ask, Wikipedia, and Delicious, as well as Flikr and YouTube, so you're never left high and dry. For pages that have been built, the quality of links combined with the logical and thoughtful layout of the results page is clearly a step up from anything else out there that I've seen. Time will tell if it takes off, but from my initial tests it looks very promising. I wish I could say the same of Wikia. For all its promise, it needs a LOT of help from the "community" if it's to make any real progress. I found it particularly discouraging that both Google and Mahalo provided links to Wikipedia in their top results (#1 and #2 respectively) but Wikia didn't have it listed anywhere in the top 10 (and unfortunately I was unable to get the site to display any results beyond the first 10 due to some scripting bug). Results like the ones for this test are unfortunately quite typical, and Wikia has a disclaimer on their site for that reason: "We are aware that the quality of the search results is low." The question is, will the smarty-pants out there who helped make Wikipedia the greatest compendium of knowledge in the history of the world step up to the challenge and do the same for the Wikia search results? Mahalo seems to think that the most efficient model is to pay people for their efforts. Wikia thinks that people will do it as a hobby, the way they do with Wikipedia. Hmmm... time will tell. For now, I recommend using Mahalo, not just because it is "powered by humans" (that, plus I have an irrational fear of developing an over-reliance on machines from watching the Terminator movies), but because it does a better job of returning relevant information and presenting it in an intelligent way than any of the purely algorithm-based engines, plus it compiles the results of all the other majors for results pages it hasn't built yet.