Mahalo: A Retro Approach to Search?
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Search engine Mahalo just launched in alpha mode at the end of May. As the newest project from Jason Calacanis, we might expect big things. But there's something very familiar about its approach. Can it really achieve superior relevance using human guides?
Calacanis' most recent claim to fame is selling Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million a couple of years ago. Since then he's managed to annoy an astonishing number of SEOs with his attitude toward search engine optimization. David Berkowitz of Media Post Publications quoted Calacanis' as explaining that "My point about SEO is that it is gaming [the] system and done by weak people who have sites that shouldn't rank high. We are not trying to SEO -- we are trying to help people avoid bad sites and find good ones."
Calacanis also has a reputation for a very large ego, as noted by Wikipedia and many others. Add that to his dislike of SEO, and you get a lot of people saying that there's no way Mahalo is going to work. And when you consider that Calacanis' approach disregards the treasured long tail of search and actually represents a step backwards of sorts...but I'm getting ahead of things.
Instead, let's take a look at Mahalo on its own merits. Taking its name from the Hawaiian word for "thank you," Mahalo's human guides build custom search results pages for search terms. Calacanis' goal is to get the top 10,000 search terms in the system, excluding adult content (there are plenty of other places users can go for that). Mahalo's guides will also build fresh pages for timely news topics, new movies, and so on. Mahalo's current stable of guides numbers 40, but is expected to increase to 100. The guides definitely have full-time jobs on their hands; not only do they have to build the original pages, they have to maintain the pages after they're built.
If you think something sounds very familiar about this approach, you're right. DMOZ did it with its own directory and About.com did it before it was known by that name, to name just two. More recently, Adam Jusko started up his own people-powered search engine, Bessed, which I reviewed here back in March. In a sense, then, this search engine is really more like a web directory, and looks more like the past of searching on the Internet rather than the future. Still, let's try it out and see what we find.
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