|
|
|
|
He Created the Web. Now He’s Out to Remake the Digital World. Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data. He has technology and a start-up pursuing that goal. Three decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee devised simple yet powerful standards for locating, linking and presenting multimedia documents online. He set them free into the world, unleashing the World Wide Web. Others became internet billionaires, while Mr. Berners-Lee became the steward of the technical norms intended to help the web flourish as an egalitarian tool of connection and information sharing. But now, Mr. Berners-Lee, 65, believes the online world has gone astray. Too much power and too much personal data, he says, reside with the tech giants like Google and Facebook - “silos” is the generic term he favors, instead of referring to the companies by name. Fueled by vast troves of data, he says, they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation.
Regulators have voiced similar complaints. The big tech companies are facing tougher privacy rules in Europe and some American states, led by California. Google and Facebook have been hit with antitrust suits. But Mr. Berners-Lee is taking a different approach: His answer to the problem is technology that gives individuals more power. “Pods,” personal online data stores, are a key technical ingredient to achieve that goal. The idea is that each person could control his or her own data - websites visited, credit card purchases, workout routines, music streamed - in an individual data safe, typically a sliver of server space. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in.
One of the most important navigational tools on the Internet is the search engine. Search engines have come and gone, but most of them followed the same strategy -- using a search algorithm to scan Web pages for the user's search terms. Web page publishers figured this out pretty quickly, and soon users were browsing through irrelevant sites just because the page's owner had hidden every search term imaginable in the page's html code. Mahalo is revolutionizing search engines with a new mission -- to give users a hassle-free, informative and relevant experience. Instead of relying on a complex algorithm to generate search results, Mahalo uses human beings. Real, live people research each search term, seeking out the sites that best fit the user's request. While most search engines depend on complex algorithms developed by a small group of people, Mahalo searches are the result of hundreds of people working to sort out the absolute best of the Web. Instead, Mahalo contributors submit search results pages (SeRPs) to a centralized database, called the Mahalo Greenhouse.
When the SeRP has a few great links in it, Mahalo publishes it to the Web, giving users access to the search results. Each SeRP includes a completion percentage, indicating how close Mahalo employees feel the results fit their ideal of 100 percent of the best links on the Web relating to that topic. The easiest way to understand the philosophy behind the Mahalo search engine is to use it. When you search for a term like "Hawaii," for example, you'll see that links are organized into subcategories. The first subcategory is "The Mahalo Top 7," a list of seven sites Mahalo employees feel are the most relevant to the term. Other subcategories include Hawaii Vacations, Hawaii State Government, Hawaii State History and Hawaii State News, among others. You can scan a search result to look for the information you need and continue browsing other links, knowing that each one is the result of careful research. In this article, we'll learn about Mahalo's internal structure and explore what the Mahalo search experience is like.
We'll look at the Mahalo Greenhouse database, where employees build and tweak search results. And, we'll find out how to build a SeRP and work for Mahalo. In the next section, we'll learn what happens when you enter a search into Mahalo. Mahalo is a Hawaiian word that means "thank you." The company's motto is "We're here to help," and the site has a Hawaiian print motif. Even Mahalo's symbol for excellent links is a Hawaiian reference -- it's an icon representing the shaka sign, a hand with the thumb and pinky finger extended, often used in Hawaii for greetings or hanging ten. These symbols are used to tag links. Warning tags: These tags tell the user that the link might be very good, but it has some things Mahalo usually tries to avoid, like pop-up ads and intrusive music, or parts of it are written in languages other than English. Moving your cursor over the warning icon generates a message that explains why the guide felt that warning was necessary.
|
|
