Mahalo, human powered scraping and the QDF algorithm
Mahalo, the human powered search engine, is using a clever tactic to achieve top rankings in Google for hot, up and coming, search phrases. Basically the editors at Mahalo are creating results pages about news stories in the hope that the pages will rank highly in Google for phrases related to the story.
Since the stories are brand new there is little competition for the keywords and no doubt the Mahalo pages are ranking very well.
In essence Mahalo is just doing the same job as Techmeme and Google News but uses editors instead. This isn’t a bad thing but I’m pretty sure Google won’t want these pages being ranked highly, auto generated or not.
The key issue is that Mahalo doesn’t bring anything extra to the party, all the information is on external pages. The list of useful links is that Google is supposed to be giving with it’s search results. The last thing Google wants to be is a list of links that points to other lists of links.
Wikipedia gets a lot of Google love because they have content and the editors there even try to encourage people not to link to a site but to rewrite the content and post it in the Wiki article.
