The Softer Side of Search: Mahalo’s “Human Powered” Solution to Search

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Mahalo is taking search back to the basics, and in doing so they are promising a clean, spam free search experience.

So what’s the big deal, there are tons of internet search options out their - What make this any different from the rest? Well for starters Mahalo’s search result are hand crafted and screened for relevance by real live human beings, and because each of Mahalo search results are hand crafted by humans you can be assured that none of those crafty little web pages fronting as a content page slips into your search results – the end product, a complete list of relevant links without having to sort through the garbage.

How the hell will they create search pages for every possible term out there?

The simple answer is: They don’t. Rather then waste time creating search pages for terms infrequently searched (e.g. Jonathan Foye) they are concentrating their efforts on created human indexed searches for the top 30% of all terms searched (e.g. Britney Spears, Anna Nicole smith, Kim jog il). Sounds like a good plan to me, why bother sending 70% of your time working on search pages that will probably only generate 30% or less of your revenue? This is a perfect application of the 80/20 Pareto Principle - Bravo Mahalo!

Is their a noticeable difference?

Try for yourself, Mahalo has a program called Mahalo Follow. Download Mahalo Follow and you will be able to compare side by side results that you get from __________(insert web search of your choice), and the results that you would get from Mahalo. When you do a search on Google you can 18 to 100s of pages of results. In order to squeeze out all of the important information from that search you the user must sort through a ton of irrelevant garbage before being assured that you have found everything you can. With Mahalo, their human powered searchers (who incidentally make around $35,000 a year, not a bad gig for searching the net all day) scour the web for the best articles on a given search topic and compile the results into a slimed down easy to process report of sorts.

So Why Try Mahalo?

Straight from Mahalo.com:

  • Save time: we took the time to find and organize the best links, so you don’t have to
  • Avoid bad sites (Mahalo never links to spam, mediocre content, or deceptive sites)
  • Our result pages are organized, comprehensive and only include great links
  • We focus on the areas where traditional search engines struggle


Tapping the Power of the Users:

Mahalo has taken on a kind of Wikipedia - Open Source – Social Bookmaking – Blogging type of feel by allowing folks other then its staff to contribute to the site. Mahalo not only relies on its staff to compile and maintain indexes of search results, it also solicits assistance from its users. Through its Greenhouse Project Mahalo offers to pay users $10 for every search page compiled (pending approval). Rates paid out increase by a dollar for each completed authoring milestone reached: 5 completed, 10 completed, all the way up to 50 completed.

Turning the Beast Against Itself:

What’s Crazy about Mahalo is that it uses Google to beat Google. In order to compile their refined human powered search results Mahalo’s search team uses Google to generate their initial search results. When a search term is entered that Mahalo hasn’t indexed/compiled yet, Mahalo bounces traffic to Google and takes a referral fee of some sort. In order to generate ad revenue from its search results Mahalo relies on Google Ad-Sense to serve up ads. Kinda crazy – even though this company is trying to start up something new they still rely on Google to get things done – all hail king Google.

So what does this all mean for me? Am I gonna grab my things and jump from the good ship Google? Probably not, but when it comes to search it’s never a bad idea to try new things especially something as innovative and different as Mahalo - This one’s a definite addition to my Firefox shortcut bar.

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October 5, 2007 | Filed Under Interests, Productivity 

Comments

One Response to “The Softer Side of Search: Mahalo’s “Human Powered” Solution to Search”

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