Mahalo Promotes Bootleg Products
Author: Blue Acorn26 Apr
For those of you who might not be aware of Mahalo - it is a “human edited” search engine. It’s goal is to provide spam-free search engine results that are deemed most valuable to the searchers as determined by a group of human editors. I’m not going to go into the whole background of Mahalo and the controversy stirred up by it’s founder Jason Calacanis - you can find plenty of that on almost every major SEO blog out there. There’s some pluses and minuses to the search engine, but in the end, they make a valiant stride at creating a spam-free search engine. So I agree with the goal, but the practicality of having a human edited search engine when Google estimates that 25% of searches have never been seen before, make it very hard, and in my opinion, unscalable, to capture a large market. However, they forge ahead, and have turned some heads along the way. But I’m not here to debate their methodology, the controversy, or the like - in my opinion a spam free search is a great goal, but the best way to get there is debatable.
Today, I did some quick searches in Mohalo to see just the quality of results that come up for certain phrases - and I don’t know if it was just me but it seemed awfully slow running a simple search - some queries took more than 10 seconds to load! But, moving forward, it became quickly apparent that Mahalo had some favorite sites that consistently made it’s top list for every query, amazon.com, eBay.com, wikipedia.com, etc. In doing some beer specific searches, I came across this section of their Guinness page for Guinness Merchandise:
While to the untrained human editor, these results may appear to be valid. First of all, I’d hate to see eBay in any shopping results, because it could theoretically be listed on every Mahalo page, and the results and the products sold on eBay are not always what I consider high quality. Mahalo is linking to an eBay search for Guinness - how do you call that quality control - they have no control over the eBay results - they are assuming that the eBay results are of high quality.
But, that’s not my issue - one thing the editors at Mahalo seem to overlook is that Guinness is a registered trademark, and as such, any merchandise sporting it’s logo or the like, must adhere to licensing standards and restrictions and be officially licensed. I should know, working on BeerTees.com for officially licensed Guinness Apparel and Clothing - I have a bit of experience in dealing with, and identifying officially licensed products vs. knockoffs and bootlegs for all types of brands. Well, the Mahalo result that throws up a red flag is for CafePress. Most of you probably know who CafePress.com is - it’s an online service that anyone can setup where you upload your own artwork, and they take care of printing it on all sorts of products and materiels, and allow you to create an online shop for it. Take a look at some of the results on the first page:
I can tell you with 99% certainty that 5 out of the 6 product pictured here are bootleg - unlicensed products (the other has no reference to Guinness). These products contain artwork created by some joe schmoe and are being sold - illegally - through CafePress.com. Apparently, Mahalo deems this as a good result. While I give the benefit of the doubt to Mahalo that they may not be aware of this issue, and to the untrained eye, they might not realize this, but the reality is that as Mahalo grows, and as they start dealing more with licensing, copyrights, and trademarks, they are going to have to be very careful to ensure that what they choose to put on their site adheres to legal standards.
Furthermore, I know for a fact that the folks at Diageo want absolutely nothing to do with their brands being printed on an “Infant Bodysuit” or “Kids T-shirt”. This goes against their social responsibility standards in which they take quite seriously (I’m surprised they haven’t put a stop to these products on CafePress.com altogether yet).
Just for full disclosure, I admit that I have a vested interest in this result being changed, but the reality is that Mahalo is promoting a site with bootlegged products, and, there are many other, better sites in regards to this category, one of which of course being BeerTees.com, but there are others like BoozinGear.com, SudsGear.com, and the like. One of my big concerns with Mahalo is that they are heavily biased towards larger sites, and the smaller, niche sites fall through the cracks. This is evident by the consistent use of the same sites over and over again throughout their results. Also, although Mahalo does disclose this, they are using affiliate linking for all Amazon.com results - how can you claim to be free of outside influence and have the searchers best interests in mind when you are taking a cut? And I digress…
NOTE: I’ve submitted this issue to their editors group, and will post an update if there are any changes made to this page.
UPDATE: The team at Mahalo was very responsive to my request on their site, a big thumbs up to them for putting in the necessary attention to maintain the quality of their results - I’m sure I’ll have more to report on Mahalo in the future - but other online retailers should have learned the power of feedback in a community driven site such as this through this experience. If your site is of quality in nature, provides value, and is relevant to the topic, suggest your link on Mahalo, start a discussion, and results can be achieved.
5 Responses for "Mahalo Promotes Bootleg Products"
Mahalo for checking out Mahalo!
This is a very interesting debate. Mahalo is community edited so the best thing for you to do is:
a) post good links to the page
b) bring up the issue on the message board on that page
c) write a blog post about the issue so we are forced to deal with it (oh wait! you already did!
If you do A&B the manager of the page will start a dialogue with you and I’m sure they will–at the very least–add the proper links to the page.
Not sure if our role is to be the police of the internet, but not sure it isn’t. If folks are looking for bootleg stuff on Google, Yahoo, etc. clearly Google and Yahoo are not at fault. If they don’t remove are they at fault? I don’t think so, they index everything including the bad stuff. For us, with humans and community editing, I’m guessing you can make the argument that we have a higher standard. However, we should still index everything folks are looking for no? Not sure we will meet that higher standard all the time in the short term. Very hard issue you bring up… there is no clear answer.
Humans are imperfect, just like machines, and it will take debate and community effort to solve these issues. I’m not the decision maker on these type of things, the community is.
Thanks for taking the time to bring up the issue. You’ve given us a lot to think about.
best jason
Thanks Jason for taking the time to provide your input and your honest feedback. I understand that Mahalo is still fairly new and results get better with community input and feedback such as this. The question you’ve raised regarding “policing” the internet is definitely a gray area for you. The matter of indexing should be yes, regardless of what the content is (given that it is valuable). The matter of policing should be handled by the respective copyright holders.
However, when you have chosen a few (four in this case) links to list for Guinness Merchandise, and one of those is a blatant disregard for proper licensing, when there are other, quality legitimate sources out there it comes down to a matter of due diligence. Granted, I’m sure it is impossible for every editor to become familiar with so many topics and it takes community feedback (such as mine that I provided) to help improve the results. I’ve provided my feedback (by submitting a problem) and suggested the link to BeerTees.com and will await a response. Thanks for chiming in!
Just wanted to let you know that I took a look at the page and updated the Merchandise section. This is one of our older pages, and I’ve put it on the Update rotation, so it should be improved drastically very soon.
Cheers,
C.K. Sample III
Editorial Director, Mahalo
Interesting point but how do you think satire and parody play into this - say a satirical tshirt about an Irish political issue but using Guinness logotype/style.
Thanks for the comment Maurice - if your question is to the legality involved of being able to manufacture and distribute these types of t-shirts - then that issue is covered under copyright infringement laws present in the country applicable. Trademark infringement, according to US law, occurs when someone uses a design that is identical or similar to an existing trademark. Guinness is trademarked as a standard character mark (you can search on USPTO.gov to find out details of their trademark) which means that even using the name Guinness in a product for sale without their permission violates that law. As you can see in the examples provided, some violate the trademark based on the logo being used without permission and some violate the trademark just by using the word Guinness. Now, I’m no legal expert but that is my interpretation of the law.
If your question is more concerned about Mahalo showing results for the satirical t-shirts then that is fine, but it still does not deter from the fact that these products are being distributed illegally. Thus, they would not belong in the Guinness category to begin with but in a more appropriate category.
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