The relatively new search engine Mahalo (Hawaiian for ‘Thank-You’) puts a spin on proceedings by pitching itself as a human powered search engine. Of course this doesn’t mean that whenever you perform a search that humans immediately start searching the net for relevant material, but rather that contributors create their own results pages which are then returned when a specific search is performed. The idea verges on the ridiculous but does certainly hold some merit.

The obvious downside is that humans simply can’t keep up with the speed of the crawlers that the likes of Google use; the computers running these crawlers are online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can sift through entire websites in seconds, noting every last detail as they go. A human based search engine is always going to be comparatively out of date and limited in terms the amount of material that can be catalogued.

As I said, there are advantages but these can only really be appreciated by using it. Head to www.mahalo.com and type in a phrase that interests you – I remained topical and typed in ‘Gordon Brown’ since he appears to be hitting the headlines a fair bit at the moment. Mahalo immediately returned to me a quick overview on the man, a photo, twelve fast facts and a large number of vetted websites with useful information which have been split in to a number of useful categories such as ‘recent news’, ‘Brown Blair Changeover’ and ‘Controversies’. In contrast, if you type the same in to Google it immediately returns 13,000,000 results for pages which mention the words Gordon or Brown; of course the most relevant sites are at the top but it still is a little more cumbersome to navigate.

It is also fairly safe to say that humans are better equipped to work out what other humans will find interesting and as such you won’t find links to any pages that contain adult content, hate speech, spam, intrusive advertising, malicious material and even sites written with a poor grasp of the English language.

The amount of content is incredibly underwhelming; a search for Paignton yielded nothing and then more worrying even the entire county, Devon, came back with no results. In its defence, the site is only a year old and there is a lot of information to be catalogued so it will certainly take some time however even at this early stage such lack of scope is worrying. I fear that unless there is a serious amount of manpower that any existing results could also soon become stale and irrelevant.

Mahalo will never be able to compete with the likes of Google in terms of the sheer scope and depth of results but to compare the two against each other would be missing the point. Mahalo isn’t trying to be Google; it is a humanly edited search engine which is being built to provide relevant, human picked material for popular subjects. Google on the other hand is a vast machine driven database of over 100,000,000 websites which is added to every second of every day. They both have their purpose, and as such would hope that there is room for them both to peacefully co-exist.

As you would well imagine the variety of the content is huge – with 65,000 videos being uploaded every 24 hours you can type practically any word or phrase in to the search box and without fail a number of results will be returned. All videos are rated by users of the site and if you choose not to search by keyword you can also view videos by category, user rating, age and popularity.

Personally I predominately use YouTube to search for music online as the extensive range of content means that you can easily find not only quickly and easily find any song you choose but additionally the associated video. Using YouTube I have managed to locate a number of more obscure songs that even several different popular peer to peer file sharing programs couldn’t help me with. The website also sets itself apart in the fact that you don’t actually download the video to your machine but simply watch it on demand.

Of course many use YouTube as the modern day equivalent of public access TV and come up with original material which can be informative, funny or just completely weird. Whilst theoretically no copyrighted material is available on the site in reality the sheer number of videos uploaded on a daily basis coupled with a rather primitive detection system means that this really isn’t the case. As the popularity of YouTube soars this will have to be something they pay more attention too if they are to avoid heavy legal bills in the future.

YouTube has also suffered criticism caused by its open door policy which means any user can upload material without its content being checked by a member of admin staff. Despite the huge amount of activity online there are only around 50 staff working for the company which means that very few videos can be randomly checked to ensure they don’t breech the terms and conditions of the site. Users can of course flag up questionable material however due to a shortage of manpower such material is often online for short period before being removed.

There is no doubting that YouTube will have to become more efficient in banning violent, pornographic and illegal videos that may work their way in to the system if it is to continue. I do however think that it is worthwhile remembering despite the pitfalls the site does provide a very worthwhile way for users to share videos with the world. Such a facility is especially useful for amateur producers who may have previously had no other way of showcasing their work.

Those without a broadband connection will probably want to give this site a miss but everyone else should certainly check out www.youtube.com when they have a spare half an hour as there is certainly something for everyone on this site.