More Pay for Traffic Plays
January 27, 2009
Mahalo.com is a social search system. The idea is that humans get involved. Humans, although more expensive than software, can handle certain tasks with greater understanding. Software still makes mistakes. Humans make some doozies as well. In search, I am on the fence about the efficacy of humans versus algorithms. More precisely, I am on the fence about the specific role of humans. In the good old days of commercial databases, humans were the way to go. The costs of people are high. Once software is locked and loaded ongoing operations can be budgeted and, in my experience, certain costs stabilized. I trade off software for humans now, but I don’t agonize over the decision. Costs control is a big deal to me.
Jeff Meiser’s “Mahalo Spices Up Information Sharing with Cash Incentives” here adds a new spin to the human intermediated Mahalo.com search service. Like Microsoft’s pay plans for Live.com search, Mahalo.com is urging searchers to “pay a few bucks” for the answer. The for fee question and answer model is what Find SVP (Paris and New York) was been doing for a long time. I’ve lost track of that company, but I recall that the sales effort to line up “gold accounts” was significant. Find SVP was a good idea in the early 1980s but the cost of sales and the cost of human researchers was brutal.
The whole pay for information sector has been under siege for many years. Dialog made people pay to ask a question and look at abstractions (Type 5 outputs). The problem was that the answer may not have been in the output. There was no easy way to run down some information in 1980 so people paid. As soon as free options became available on the Internet, the bottom fell out of some commercial information services. You can see some of the financial burden if you look at the 10 Ks for traditional information companies in the commercial database business. Certain sectors are flat. Thomson has exited some of its information businesses. A wise move. Reed Elsevier is trying to increase revenues and hold down costs of information operations that involve humans. Tough job. Blue chip consulting firms run pay to ask question services as well. To make this work, the client has to be convinced that the answers come with a pedigree. So humans can improve certain information operations but humans cost a great deal. Add sales and subject matter experts together and you get a Bermuda Triangle of costs.
Mr. Meiser’s article doesn’t dig into the past with pay for answers. That’s fine. He does include information about finding answers on Facebook and Twitter. He provides some color about the smart money that is behind Mahalo.com. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
Since no single player has emerged as dominant using the question-and-answer search model in the U.S., Mahalo sees a unique opportunity to become the industry leader.
I am all for optimism. I recall reading some open source information from Googzilla on this function. My hunch is that Mahalo.com may find itself under pressure if the GOOG makes available some of its nifty automated question answering methods. At that point, question and answer services that charge and have humans in the mix will face a long, tough road to success.
Stephen Arnold, January 27, 2009
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2 Responses to “More Pay for Traffic Plays”
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hi do you know Ovoidal.com ? ovoidal is a Metasearch engine for finding web pages, news, pictures, blogs, Downloads, Reference, Shopping, Games, Entertainment and Books with added special functions for refining the query and search result set…
Interesting to see Mahalo described as a social search system. Would it be more accurate to describe it as a human powered Q&A service? If so, isn’t this a lot like ChaCha? (aha, I see you described ChaCha just like that, too)
In my opinion, Mahalo is simply an SEO play, with cca 50% of traffic coming from SEs:
http://referralanalytics.compete.com/referral/mahalo.com
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/site_referrals/mahalo.com