Mahalo: A Retro Approach to Search? - First Glance
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Mahalo has a very attractive, inviting home page, thanks to its hiring "the best designer on the planet," according to Calacanis. Here's a screen shot, cropped and resized to fit:
It's obviously not as bare bones as Google, but not as busy as Yahoo. It actually displays 12 main categories on the home page, with plenty of subcategories as you can see. According to the press release, only 4,000 SERPs have been built as of yet. "We're in month five of a five-year project," Calacanis explained. He hopes to reach that magic 10,000 by the end of this year, at which time the site will enter beta and then launch.
Just for the heck of it, I really wanted to see one of Mahalo's pre-built pages, so I clicked on "Guitar" under "Products." What I got was really too gorgeous and well put together to do justice to with just one screen shot...so I'll compromise by giving you a screen shot and explaining the rest:
Okay, right under the search box near the top left of the page it says what category and subcategory the page belongs to -- in this case Products, then Musical Instruments. On the right you'll see a box with a "Guide Note" that defines what a guitar is in one sentence, followed by some "Fast Facts" about guitars ("Conventional no. of strings: Six.").
Of course it's everything under the word "Guitar," carefully organized by type, that really makes this page a drool-worthy resource. The first list is "The Mahalo Top 7," which I'm assuming Mahalo considers to be the seven most important links relating to guitars. And it's a nice mix: the Wikipedia entry, a news site devoted to guitars, the official sites for Fender and Gibson, and others.
It doesn't stop there, of course. There are five links to "Guitar Performances on YouTube;" a similar number of links to "Guitar Information & News;" eleven links to "Electric Guitar Manufacturers;" five links to "Acoustic Guitar Manufacturers;" four links to "Bass Guitar Manufacturers;" and on and on. There were separate lists on the page, with varying numbers of links, for guitar retailers, guitar bargains, guitar accessories, guitar tabs, guitar images, guitar heroes(!), guitar boards & blogs, and related searches. My hat's off to Jeff Lauras, who wrote this page (as it says right at the bottom). This is an example of what human-powered search can be at its best.
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