The future of human search

After more than a year of release, mahalo made "human search" popular. Many companies are positioning themselves like this, and many of them are very rough, so the human search threshold is not high. This article analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of human search, their different strategies, and the future of human search.

New bottled old wine?

At the early stage of Mahalo's release, people had the intuition that this was a new bottle of old wine? Even on the Internet
Before its birth, traditional publishers were engaged in human searches, which were called directories. Manually edited to work under a specific topic. The expert content they produced was subsequently obtained by Google
Search is called long-tail Publishing, a traditional and slowly growing part of the media industry.

However, is the Internet driven by humans rather than software feasible?

Three feasible and two unfeasible reasons

There are three reasons for a lot of people to do better than software:

1. Spam Information Control: even the most cunning spam information can be easily identified by humans.
2. Duplicate information control: there is a large amount of duplicate information on the Internet, which is a waste of time.
3. Differential Identification: even if a computer uses very expensive and complex programs, it may not be able to tell whether "apple" is a fruit or a company.

Two opposite reasons:

1. It is hard to convince people to give up Google unless you are doing better in all search fields than Google, but providing better results on some topics does not work.
2. As a general site, you may not win users. If a user needs to go to a site in a certain field that he is interested in, he will find the site through Google.

The three positive reasons are not more powerful than the two negative ones, and the latter two reasons can completely block users.

Spending money on content?

Mahalo pays users to provide content, which means they can control the quality of search results, which requires a lot of money. Mahalo
Very rich. No competitor can copy this model. As a result, mahalo has made a full article before taking off officially. Mahalo
It is a private company. We don't know when it will make a profit, or whether it is possible to make a profit in the current economic environment. In the current environment, if Mahalo
There is no clear profit route, and no one will buy it.

Let the community create content?

Most companies choose to create content in the community. The most typical example is Wikipedia. How can you get better content than Wikipedia? How do you encourage people to create content for you if you cannot pay as much as Mahalo does. Google Knol
The method is to use AdSense ads in Knol and make the author get profits. However, the market prospect of Knol is still unclear. If Google
No. How can other people win? If the Knol competitors also learn how to make profits for the authors through AdSense, their profit margin is obviously more than that of Google
Low.

Competitors

Another company tied to human search tags is wipers, which was created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Their content was created by the community but seems to be managed by a full-time administrator.

Squidoo looks pretty rough, and it's hard to say whether it can attract users. Looking at its performance in tradevibes, there is no difference with other small wiki companies, and wiki is not new now.

About.com is almost the originator of this industry, and now belongs to New York Times. It is observed that about is another search engine that provides a lot of knowledge in addition to Wikipedia. According to their current operation, it should be very profitable. Therefore, Mahalo, Wiki and other human search engines should have a bright future.

International Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/human_powered_search.php
Source: comsharp CMS official website