14 DAY TRIAL // The attendees at the DLD conference, in Munich, were given a treat when Fortune's David Kirkpatrick hosted a talk dubbed "Humans Disrupting Algorithms", who had Mahalo's Jason Calacanis and Wikia Search's Jimmy Whales in the hot seats. They both gave quite an interesting presentation of their products, but approached the topic in two very different manners.
Jason Calcanis chose to thunder over the way Google and others' algorithms had done a very poor job of keeping spammed content in check and were continuously liable to SEO gaming. As opposite to that, he highlighted that humans always do a better job with those mentioned above and cannot fail. Jimmy Whales chose a different approach, more circumspect, and tried to woo the audience to his start-up by talking about the way users would help Wikia Search become better and better with time.
But when it was all getting pretty interesting, who called for the mike and jumped in? Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. It looks like she or Matt Cutts are everywhere there's a chance people might be discussing the brand whose colors they fly. That's not bad, it means they're careful and perhaps that they want to dismiss any accusations on sight and on site.
"JIMMY People love to talk about human powered search vs the algorithm. But I want to say that Google have hundreds of people looking to increase search quality. They are making editorial decisions even though they are engineers.
MARISSA MEYER Google I have obviously a ton of thoughts. It is like before when you could organize your own documents into folders on your computer. Nowadays you absolutely need to have desktop search. The same thing applies to the web. To take an algorithm and enhance it with editorial without introducing bias is the solution, if you can find it.
JASON I agree with everything she said. Can I work for you?
MARISSA MEYER The problem isn't with the searching process, it's with the result. You can't do the fat If you read Chris Anderson, the real value is in the long tail. So if I did a startup I would do something else. I would do a Facebook," is what the transcript that Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb posted reads.
As you see, the charges are always dismissed right there and then, in a pretty harsh way, I might add. There's no way the three could have come to the same conclusion, because their views are so very different.