He's got to be aware of their business practices (content scraping/aggregation), whether you phrase them as SEO or not. This article is a long read, but it clearly points out the issue that many of those arguing against Google in one form are using Google (and search engines in general) to their advantage in others.
I think your completely right. I was once talking with an angel about one of the companies they had invested in and got the reply "I don't know what their doing I'm just an investor." Whether this is a good thing or not is up to discussion.
I don't see that as much of an excuse. Investing in a company isn't like paying taxes; you voluntarily decide who to invest in, and ethically (if not legally) you have some responsibility for their actions.
What's with Danny Sullivan's and searchenginelands's crusade against Mahalo? Is it just blogsphere link-bait or is there a reason for all this attention on their questionable business model?
It's kind of a combined attack from anyone in the SEO space.
Mahalo was built up going by Google's search guidelines and has made itself an authority online. They're at a level where almost anything they publish gets picked up immediately and ranks fairly well in the SERPs. What they're doing currently are practicing grey/black hat tactics of which almost all are frowned upon by Google (ie. acting as a content scraper with no original content). Because of this authority they've built before, they currently get away with it.
Small sites would be banned or punished for some of the things they're doing, but they haven't even received a slap on the wrist.
Another reason this gets a lot of us SEOs fired up is because Mahalo is doing the same thing Jason preached against. He called everyone in the SEO industry a scumbag and preached about how Mahalo would put SEOs out of business with their 'human powered search'. Mahalo as a destination site failed so they switched to become (essentially) an article directory who get most of their traffic organically through search. The problem is they're creating low value pages with nothing but ads and scraped content. Those pages are what Jason claimed he wanted to get rid of in the first place, one of the reasons he started Mahalo.
The SEO community is pissed about this because it gives us a bad name, building on the bad PR we got when Jason went on this gigantic anti-SEO campaign a couple years back. We're just trying to point out the hypocrisy here and the only way to do that is to present our argument and hope that Google hears us.
Investing isn't 'gotcha' politics or rhetoric. There's no reason why all a person's investments have to advance some unified self-consistent theory of the world. In fact, it's almost certainly better if they don't.
If an investor is choosing well, their investments altogether can be like a roulette wheel where red, black, and green all have positive expectations. No, they can't each come up at the same time, but that exclusivity doesn't make it irrational to bet them all simultaneously.
This was a pretty good advertisement for Mahalo. I didn't even need Google to find it.
Cuban may simply be voicing that finding something in a search index doesn't compare to the value of finding something through the social graph or something hand-picked by humans.
But I didn't get to see his whole presentation. Just the two sentences this author ripped from it. (tongue in cheek)
i believe that when mahalo launched it was meant to be a competitor (alternative to google). However, they have now revised their model and leverage google to drive traffic. So when cuban invested he may have seen it as a different play than it now is
