SES NY 2008 Day 3 Winner: Jeffrey Rohrs pwns Jason Calacanis
Mar 20, 2008 Google Adwords
To be honest, I had never heard of Jason Calacanis until he made his keynote address at Search Engine Strategies New York. I had never heard of Mahalo.com either, the supposedly human curated web directory with the highest quality user generated SERPs anywhere. After hearing Jason speak, it’s a wonder he was ever invited to the conference in the first place. Not to say that it wasn’t interesting, mind you.
Mahalo’s obvious goal is to turn the search industry on it’s head by utilizing an old directory-based engine. They’re basically implementing web 2.0 functionality to Yahoo’s old directory, circa 1998. What’s the goal? Improve the way we think about search, and how we find and disseminate information.
Supplant Google?
I think not.
Get people talking? Most definitely, but not for the right reasons. Unforunately for most of us, Day 3 was kind of weak, so my pick for winner of the day goes to an audience member, and not a presenter or session.
Enter Jeffrey Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget. Jeffrey is perhaps the only moderator I recall as being able to contribute to discussion sessions and pose questions the audience is really thinking, but perhaps too afraid to ask by themselves.
During his keynote address, Jason Calacanis showed examples of how Mahalo allows you to customize your blended (aka universal, rich search, multimedia, etc) search results pages. He showed one example where the user’s query generated a page with text links, user generated content, reviews, friends that rated a product or article highly, etc. He admitted that part of Mahalo’s content sometimes defaults to Google results, whereby only the natural search results get displayed prominently. The paid search results are hidden in a far bottom right corner, with only 1 or 2 placements available.
Bad news for SEM?
I think not. Again.
There is a reason Google is king around these parts. Google recognizes the need for well-developed pedigreed sites to appear high in the natural search results, and the need for other quality sites to use sponsored search programs to draw attention and generate revenue. If you strip Google SERPs of Adwords Ads, you’re likely to piss off the entire online marketing community - real quick. Not to mention any other content providers out there that you skim data from.
Hence the brilliance of Jeffrey Rohrs’ question to Jason:
Q. You tend to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. But Mahalo supplants Google’s paid listings in their results. Can you address this?
A. When people go to (the) Internet, what they end up doing is their choice. It’s their right to do whatever they want with their data.
Jason, get a grip. You’re essentially getting people to generate these search results pages one at a time, approving or declining their content, and paying them for approved submissions. Doesn’t this boil down to a weird paid link scheme? Who’s to say that company staffers aren’t writing these pages and boosting the prevalence of corporate pages and affiliates for select keywords? How would you know that were the case at all?
In the past, Jason Calacanis hasn’t made many friends in the blogosphere, he’s angered many in the SEO industry, and probably spawned more than a few enemies in the affiliate marketing community. Adding SEMs to the mix is a grand slam if I ever saw one.
Leave a Reply