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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop giving Mahalo and Jason Calacanis more airtime than they deserve ?

Every post like this just fuels the fire and creates more drama around the theme and in the end will benefit the spammer.

There is no such thing as 'bad publicity'.

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No. This isn't someone commenting on an inflammatory comment that Calacanis made in order to attract attention. It's someone outing Calacanis for shady business practices, and putting more pressure on Google to end those practices.

It's part of the search engine scammer playbook to stay just close enough to the line for people like us to get exhausted hearing about it.

Calacanis shady business practices have been outed for months, plenty of google employees read HN, there really is no reason for him to still be around in the google index.

Yup, this is the worst part, he is getting away with this even though tens of Google employees, and i'm sure including Matt Cutts, have read these articles. They do nothing about it..

Companies like Google care about and have responded to populist uprisings like this in the past (especially as it relates to search quality). I imagine that's the actual goal here.

Why would they? This generates revenue for Google.

There's no excuse for them not having banning them from day one, like they do every other individual trying to capitalize on the same tactics -- only the sheer capitalization and size that Jason brought to the table allowed him to get away with this at scale.

Shame on Google for having double standards, IMHO.

Google has made revenue negative banning decisions in the past. They have demonstrated that they recognize that the long-term quality of their index is more important than short term profits.

Every banning is against revenue, yet Mahalo still is operational......... Google's lack of definitive action against Mahalo's outright spam is the clear example here.

Google ultimately generates revenue from people using their engine and ad server to find things. If the quality thereof goes down, you will see people flow out of Google. If you say, no, that won't happen, remember people have to flow into Google in the first place... it's not the default search engine for the majority of installs...

If mahalo were pulled from the rankings, other pages, most likely of better quality, would fill that space.

There is nothing to prevent them from using adsense to monetize the quality of their (non-scraped) content.

If google cared they could switch him off in 2 seconds flat.

And if they're not aware by now they're asleep at the switch.

You're conflating Google's caring about the alleged practice and the public's perception of the practice.

If people are qualitatively unhappy with search results, Google will care. These posts serve to highlight that displeasure.

I think it's a mistake to think of large corporations as singular entities in these sorts of cases. Given what I know about big-company politics, I am positive that there are people inside Google who support banning Mahalo and others who do not. Political battles like these are not resolved quickly, and an ongoing visible public backlash is the best weapon those who support banning him have.

If mahalo is 'borderline' or even 'ok' to a large faction inside Google they have real problems.

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