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<\/a><\/p>\nMahalo’s got exactly the right idea and exactly the wrong idea at the same time.\u00c2\u00a0 My mom would love a site that uses humans to generate the top results for common searches like this one and outsources the rest of the results and the results for topics it doesn’t cover yet, behind the scenes, to someone like Google.\u00c2\u00a0 I would love to install it as her home page.\u00c2\u00a0 But she’s not going to want to watch Mahalo’s compulsory YouTube video or share the page on Facebook.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s also not going to know what to do when Mahalo returns a Wiki-stub with a spam link or two as search results for something.\u00c2\u00a0 Mahalo dedicates most of their page space to non-search stuff\u00c2\u00a0 (scroll down for Web 2.0 overload) and puts stuff like Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Propeller on every page — and I don’t know a single person who knows what Propeller is.<\/p>\n
Why is Mahalo targeting young, first-adopter, super-wired people instead of people like my mom?\u00c2\u00a0 When we’re searching, all the Web 2.0 goodies in the world won’t intrigue us – we want good results fast.\u00c2\u00a0 And in terms of good results fast, their editors are never going to be able to put together a page that will be able to beat Google for me.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been searching the Internet for 12 years, and I’m as good or better than anyone they can afford to hire to write guide pages for them.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyone who’s heard of Propeller is probably even better.\u00c2\u00a0 The people who need human-powered help aren’t people like me, they’re people like my mom.<\/p>\n
If Mahalo could get their name out as the site where you send your parents when they want to get a copy of their credit report without getting hit with $75 of nearly-fraudulent charges, they would get dozens and dozens of older eyeballs.<\/p>\n
My mom likes to buy crap, and has a reasonable amount of disposable income.\u00c2\u00a0 If you show her an ad for a porcelain unicorn (something that has 0% chance of confusing her when she’s searching for her credit report, but something she’s searched for before), she just might buy it.\u00c2\u00a0 And there are a LOT of people over 45 with disposable income who get confused by Google’s search results.<\/p>\n
Most of these people don’t understand that all that small print at creditreport.com means “these guys are going to charge me every month if I take them up on the ‘free credit report’ offer.”\u00c2\u00a0 And a lot of them might throw in a “2008” at the end of their searches.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think PageRank is going to be able to stay ahead of the search engine optimization people in cases like these.<\/p>\n
Mahalo can.\u00c2\u00a0 They need to be targeting people like my mom.<\/p>\n
Right now, Google won’t pay the price for raking in their share of the spoils creditreport.com got from screwing over my mom.\u00c2\u00a0 My mom is in the demographic of people who blame themselves whenever something goes wrong and a computer is involved.\u00c2\u00a0 She won’t blame Google (like I do), and nobody else is any better anyway.\u00c2\u00a0 cRANKy, the search engine targeting people over 50, is way too terrible to recommend.<\/p>\n
For now, my mom will fight with CreditReport.com’s customer service, then initiate a chargeback with her credit card company.\u00c2\u00a0 Next time she needs something like this, she will call me and feel ashamed that she can’t handle something that sounds so simple on her own.\u00c2\u00a0 And until someone makes a better search for older people, call-your-kids search will be the answer.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like it was in 1998.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The people who need human-powered help aren’t people like me, they’re people like my mom. <\/p>\n
If Mahalo could get their name out as the site where you send your parents when they want to get a copy of their credit report without getting hit with $75 of nearly-fraudulent charges, they would get dozens and dozens of older eyeballs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[18,17,15,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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