adamsb

Good question -- the criteria would have to be serp quality as close to the pages they already have published. So in other words, the Mahalo staff has already set the bar for a standard; submissions would need to meet or exceed this quality.

In the end, the staff has the discretion to say "Sorry, your serp doesn't match the quality of our other pages." There's no objective way to measure EVERY page, because the entire concept of Mahalo is based on their subjective expertise for search results.

The beauty of human-powered search :)

Rob:
Yeah, I agree that having something like this wide open *could* generate spam results, but the whole idea is that Mahalo is screened and tailored, so they (being Mahalo staff) can scan the submissions for valid serps before accepting them into the contest.

And it would be easy to automate submissions on the front-end ("Sorry the term 'Apple iPhone' already has a page!"). So essentially the whole point of the contest would be to leave it up to the submitters to craft the best serps because the effectiveness of their submissions is what's being calculated/judged.

Go for volume:

Have a contest where you hold a limited-time Open Submission for SERP's. Anyone can submit five (or 10, or 20) search result pages... After reviewing and posting them to Mahalo, track the traffic.

Whoever has the most hits to their submitted pages wins an iPhone.

That's one way to do it :)

Excellent interview that was very telling and engaging!

Fact: Media is run by people. People are inherently fallible.

You bring up a great point: moderation is the key!

Right on Yatrik :)

Exactly, some places have a very "Don't ask, don't tell" policy... I'll stick to making my own food from now on instead!

Anil: There is some discrepancy in what you said about paying users to "generate content," because Jason doesn't pay them to do that. He pays them to find content generated by other people.

And that in itself wouldn't be deception unless they were getting paid to pimp certain content.

Bloggers would be writing about something they may or may not feel very passionate about at all.

The problem couldn't be any more obvious than that.

Is that fair to the reader? In all honesty, the advertisers get what they pay for, and the bloggers get paid for a certain service... all that adds up just fine.

But the real travesty is to the reader.

Oh man, that is so awesome! (I was going to call it "cool" instead... but the pun would have killed me ;)

Did your grandmother really tell you that? Now THAT'S some advice lol

Good one dudes.

So with taxes (which aren't shown) we're still pretty high up there (in my *cheapskate* opinion) Ben gets a star, because he's so cute when he gets angry ^_^