Mahalo

I was impressed by the Jason Calacanis keynote at SES NY today. Mr. Calacanis is a serial entreprenuer, current CEO of Mahalo, and has been the center of a fair amount of SEO controversy.

What impressed me most about Mr. Calacanis was his conviction that search needs to evolve and, specifically, algorithmic search is not the right answer for every query. This thinking is the rationale behind Mahalo - a human assisted search engine. Every result page on Mahalo is created by a person, and every request for site inclusion is reviewed by a person. By using people to determine site relevancy for a given search term, Mahalo and Mr. Calacanis have given us a true measure of relevancy and effectively taken away the lion's share of what the average SEO bills her clients for.

Mr. Calacanis also commented that he believed SEOs today are too focused on the near-term win as opposed to a longer term strategy of building value. In defense of SEOs everywhere, they're only partially to blame for this. The link-based page rank algorithms promote a culture of deception. It's either too tempting to try to game the system or there's no choice becuase all your competitors are doing it. How can Mr. White Hat win when all those shades of grey exist and his clients are being promised hundreds (or thousands) of inbound links?

Perhaps this is why te SEO industry has been so defensive when it comes to remarks Mr. Calacanis has made in the past. If SEOs were secure in their craft, why would they care what anybody says? The writing is on the wall and the SEO industry sees the changes that are coming. Universal search, hand edited page rank, human assisted search engines, and even social media threaten to alter the fabric of SEO, and the situation has more than a few people scared.

Rather than claiming every blog post which questions the current SEO industry is "SEO Hate," it would be better to embrace the fact that search, and thus SEO, are immature industries. Spurred on by advances in technology, the search industry will continue to evolve at a rapid pace and what we consider SEO today will be vastly different just a few years from now - and those that continue to focus on the short term will be left behind rather quickly.