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 A human based search engine is always going to be comparatively out of date and limited in terms the amount of material that can be catalogued.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.

We can certainly give the economy the strongest chance of bouncing back by trying to stick to existing spending patterns as much as possible rather than putting our lives on hold or changing our lifestyles whenever the media suggests that it would be prudent to do so. I’m not denying that some belts may need to be tightened but fortunately a lot of this can be done without changing your existing lifestyle.

Let’s start with the obvious; electricity and gas. These utilities have been making the papers recently and if the headlines are to be believed then massive increases are unavoidable, however in reality these increases are predominately confined to the basic tariffs the energy companies offer. The truth is that the majority of customers are shouldn’t be on these tariffs anyway as they are unlikely to be the most cost effective. Despite the fact that locating the cheapest supplier and tariff then making the change would be unlikely to take more than an hour and could save hundreds, very few have bothered making the effort.

There are a vast majority of price comparisons on the market but my favourite at the moment (purely down to the fact it has consistently given me the best prices) is moneysupermarket.com.

This site is split in to sub-categories which will allow you to search for the cheapest deals on the following:

Money – Credit cards, loans, mortgages, current and savings accounts.

Insurance – All the obvious including home, car, life, pet, medical and breakdown.

Travel – Flights, holidays, car hire and hotels

Gas and Electricity – Fairly self explanatory

Communication – Phone, Broadband and Mobile

Only by comparing the market will you know whether you are paying too much. Even a few hours spent to establish that you are indeed using the most suitable suppliers then it would be time well spent, however I’m confident that practically every reader could still make savings in some areas. Bearing in mind that in the case of mortgages, loans and credit cards then a few hours spent checking could easily result in savings running in to the thousands.

It would be apt now to mention the old ‘a penny saved is a penny earned’ maxim however I for one have always found this particular nugget of wisdom to be inaccurate. The hypothetical penny spent would have originally been a greater figure before tax was deducted. Those working within a 22% tax band can consider their penny saved to be the equivalent of 1.22p earned.

The term was coined by O’Reilly Media 2.0 back in 2003, and was popularised by the first Web 2.0 convention in 2004 and then a series of successive conferences. Eventually it become adopted by the wider community however when a customer of mine asked me earlier today to define exactly what Web 2.0 meant I was stuck; hence my sudden need to write this article.

I don’t feel bad for not knowing how to define the standard as even Tim O’Reilly, the man who is credited with creating the term seems to describe it in an incredibly cryptic and nondescript way. Apparently “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Right, so in English what exactly does this mean? I think the best way I can describe it is to say that Web 2.0 is a term used to describe a website that has increased the overall functionality of the Web; as such, the term can mean different things to different people. Broadly speaking a website that provides new and interactive technologies such as weblogs, social websites, podcasts, RSS feeds and online web services can fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella.

Personally I think that the phrase is a nonsensical buzzword which has been coined for no real reason than the fact that it sounded catchy. Using the phrase in a meaningful way can be close to impossible since many of the core components of Web 2.0 have existed from the very earliest days of the web.

For educational purposes I should really go over the typical characteristics that are used to make up a typical Web 2.0 site and these are as follows:

– Users being able to contribute to the data on a site; Wikipedia is a good example of this.

– An element of social networking such as MySpace.

– Allow users to use applications entirely through a browser. A web operating system such as Goowy which I reviewed several months back is a good example of this.

– A smart and user friendly interface; often based on a new technology such as Ajax.

– An ability for the user to enhance the application or website as they use it.

Our website design company Refresh Creations often gets people touting that their websites are categorised as Web 2.0, but when you delve deeper it becomes apparent that they have simply installed a trivial feature such as a blog to allow them to make this claim.

Personally, I hate buzzwords and have little time for people that utilize them when pitching ideas or sales pitches to me. Therefore it is somewhat unsurprising that I simply don’t ‘get’ Web 2.0 – due to the lack of set standards to what it actually refers to you can end up making the phrase mean practically anything you want it to.

Even after researching this article for best part of an hour I’m still a little bit unsure as to what the phrase actually means and I don’t think this is my failure to grasp the concept but rather the fact that it hasn’t been correctly, accurately or solidly defined.

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.