One thing we noticed online recently has been the launch of mahalo.com. What’s that then? Well, it’s a new “human powered†search engine. Launched in May 2007, the idea behind it is that by using human editors it will make search results that are more relevant to the end user. Mahalo describe themselves as “a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search termsâ€.
The Mahalo site has certainly been generating lots of interest in the media over the last few weeks. It would seem that the jury isn’t quite out yet on how useful or successful people think the site will prove to be.
Reading through the FAQ’s on the Mahalo site it would seem that it’s everything I could possibly want! I’d like to discover new content. I want to spend more time enjoying new content rather than waste time looking for it! I’d love to wave goodbye to spam, mediocre content and deceptive sites! However, in practice I don’t think Mahalo can live up to this just yet.
I thought that I would try the site out with a few random searches using some of our clients key phrases. I tried the following terms: SEO Nottingham, Blog Nottingham, Luxury b&b, and Avoid repossession. Unfortunately none of these terms had any results written for them. The site is aiming to write results pages for the 20,000 most popular search terms on the net, and are focusing on the most popular first.
Next I decided to check out the list for search terms they want people to write search terms for. The most wanted list for hobbies has some interesting ones! For any of you who would like to write content for the site, some current unclaimed topics include Charades, Laser Tag, Morse Code and Tanuki! I felt slightly disappointed that somebody had already done Jousting and Whale Watching!
So, overall what do I think? Mahalo might mean “Thank you†in Hawaiian, but for now at least I think I’ll give it an unconvinced “err, you what?â€
Mahalo for taking the time to check out Mahalo.com!
The goal of the site is not to do long tail searchers, but rather have humans spend 4-10 hours making the top, most popular searches better. If we don’t have a human curated result we show machine search (right now, Google). So the concept is that we can REALLY help on the popular searches. So, try searches like Paris Hotels, iPhone, or breast cancer and then compare them to Ask, Yahoo, or Google and I think you’ll see what we’re trying to do.
Right now we’re ~90 days old and have 11,000 pages done. We’ll have 25,000 soon and that’s when I think you’ll find the service really compelling.
again, mahalo for trying us out!
all the best,
Jason
Hi Jason,
Thanks for taking the time to comment on our blog.
I think I’m just disappointed that the site didn’t live up to my expectations. I do understand the concept behind the site, it’s just that I didn’t really find anything on there that I don’t think I could have found through Google or any other search engine.
I signed up to the site to help find and write content, but then found that I was restricted by the most wanted list. I emailed in and offered to write the page for techno music, but someone emailed me back to say that apparently this would be encompassed under the section for ‘electronica’. These are two very different things, so once again I was disappointed!