Manual seach engine Mahalo to (hopefully) rival Google
Mahalo, a human-powered(!) search engine was launched by Jason Calacanis. Mahalo is the second innovative search site launched this year - the first being Powerset.
Calacanis hopes that Mahalo will beat Google, and win over the organic search results segment, which is now crowded by spam, MFAs(Made-For-AdSense) and wiki sites.
A flashback : Powerset launched with aims similar to Mahalo.
Mahalo, means “Thank You” in Hawaiian. Results are handpicked and classified into topics like as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports.
When Google launched, it was hailed as the greatest, due to its simple, pleasing layout and clean results. But now, over time, black-hat SEOs have found ways to circumvent Google’s anti-spam policy, and unwanted results are seeping through to the top search results. Both Powerset and Mahalo seek to hit Google and other computer-powered search engines, in that respect. Calacanis says that Mahalo will have “only” relevant results, as all of their results are handpicked by trained guides.
Search results appear in this order : those handpicked by Mahalo guides, user-submitted, and finally Google results. If no relevant results are available, Google results are served. Note the irony that a company which aims to Google actually has to depend on it for some of the search results.
User-submitted links appear in the right sidebar, fuelled by a Digg-like system, where more the users submit a particular link, the better its position in the list. Spam will be dealt seriously - the link will be banned, and so will the user and his IP.
There are just 40 guides employed by Mahalo. They have churned out some 4,000 result pages. They expect to hit the 10,000 mark by 2008, and 25,000 by 2009.
The site stays in Alpha state until the end of 2007, after which it will be in beta. We will only see a full-fledged Mahalo in 2009(or they say so).
What’s their business model? They obviously cannot float without revenues.
Update: Just read that Mahalo had two rounds of capital-raising, the size of which remain undisclosed. Calacanis claims that he has enough juice to run Mahalo without revenues until 2011.
