Mahalo is a human powered search engine. Yea, I said that right, and it’s probably not what you think. What comes to my mind when I hear ‘human powered search engine’ is Google’s server room with a few thousand high school cross-country stars wailing away on human-size hamster wheels. Because that sounds reasonable.
Nope, instead there is a team of people actually creating the results pages you see, so the results are super awesome. Oh, and if they haven’t bothered to create that page yet, you get a kind apology, and results from the market leader.
I’m not gonna weigh in on this anymore, as plenty of smarter people have already done so. Check them out here, here and here, for starters.
14 responses so far ↓
1 Markk // May 31, 2007 at 4:21 pm
‘Oops! We haven’t hand-written a result page for “melbourne” yet.’
Bit of an oversight there, don’t you think?
But then they have ‘Related Results’ which shows ‘Melbourne Restaurants’, ‘Melbourne Hotels’ etc. Then they have the Google results and Google ads, so they’re having their cake and eating it too.
The pages they have been bothered creating are good quality and I can see the use in this sort of approach.
2 Adam // Jun 2, 2007 at 10:24 am
Certainly there could be a use for it. The market would probably be our grandmothers. Anyone else would find their way to all of those links themselves.
Besides, can you imagine how much work that would be?
3 Jason // Jun 2, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Mahalo for the feedback!
It is an alpha product as we’ve said… we’re in month five of a five year project. In time we will have obvious searches like Melbourne, and they will be the outstanding, spam-free, quality you see from the other search results.
The goal is to help people with the top searches, and the ones that are the most polluted by spam like travel, products, health, and… welll, anything that has a significant financial motive around it.
the beauty of this approach is, of course, that the places we can help users the most are the ones that are the most profitable from an advertising perspective–so it’s a “win win” if you will.
I think it’s worth noting that the folks who are giving us a hard time are mainly in the SEO business. That’s a business where you make your bread and butter tweaking the algorithms of search engines with tips and tricks. Mahalo if successful–and it’s a certainly a big if–will be the end of that black art for the best search terms.
Spammers and SEOs can’t get past our team of humans.
If you look at the folks involved with us, they are the top minds, investors, and media companies in the space… I think I would take their vote (which comes in the form of dollars and their names), over the votes of SEOs who are going to be faced with their own extinction.
4 Carl Pei // Jun 3, 2007 at 5:01 am
Haha, sweet bashing.
5 Mahalo Response from Mr. Calacanis // Jun 3, 2007 at 1:27 pm
[…] infamous Jason Calacanis (of Mahalo, Netscape.com, Weblogs, Inc.) commented on my previous Mahalo post. I feel slightly important […]
6 Vagioninegag // Dec 6, 2007 at 4:46 pm
m.. nice post dude!
7 Gregg Ayers // Nov 13, 2008 at 12:06 am
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8 Social Network // Oct 5, 2009 at 1:38 am
Never heard of Mahalo. Personally I think it’s great to know of multiple search engines to visit. The fact that this one differs from Google is great and I will use it often. Thanks
9 Beth Charette // Jan 5, 2010 at 12:46 am
Yes, we have researched Mahalo.
They seem honest and straight forward, although I am wondering personally if they will be another service like Ask Jeeves, as one of the articles you referred to mentions.
Anyway, as long as we have Google and Yahoo to fall back on, Mahalo can’t do any harm, so long as they verify the answers they get.
I can see some room for abuse here, since the service seems to be relying on the good will of responders.
In this world, to assume that people will give them only accurate information is a huge assumption.
Even to assume that the answers are generated with good will is a huge assumption.
Mahalo must have some way to verify answers.
10 Melbourne Personal Trainer // Mar 15, 2010 at 12:12 am
I do like Maholo. I remember when it just started.
11 iPad Ron // May 10, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Very funny piece. I’ll side step that one though
12 ISO 9001 // Dec 5, 2010 at 4:42 pm
I like this site. The post here has given me the commitment to learn a lot more. Thanks.
13 Solar China // Dec 20, 2010 at 11:27 pm
I’m not gonna weigh in on this anymore, as plenty of smarter people have already done so
14 Creative Writing - Perpendicularity.org // Feb 27, 2011 at 10:05 am
Personally, I think their idea of a “human powered” search engine is somewhat genuine and with good intentions, but at the same time, is doomed for failure and is a complete waste of time. Well, except for any advert revenue that is going to be gained during the process. For now, when it comes pay-per-click income, I’ll just stick to creative writing, blogging, or informative articles, etc.
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