Long before there was Google, two other guys from Stanford created a Web directory called Yahoo. Now, a serial entrepreneur with plenty of venture capital is doing it again, building what he calls “the first human powered search engine.” While I question whether it’s the first, it is certainly true that Mahalo.com is unique compared with today’s major search products because it’s compiled not by clever algorithms but by smart humans.Jason McCabe Calacanis, who earlier founded Weblogs that he sold to AOL, has hired a cadre of researchers who spend their time searching the Web to locate and vet sites that they then enter into their own hand-crafted search engine.
Calacanis, who introduced his new site last week at the D: All Things Digital Conference in Carlsbad, acknowledges that humans can’t create as many search results as machines, but claims that “humans using machines can create much better results.”
Currently, the company employs 30 researchers, called “guides” who use tools such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Delicious, Technorati and other services to locate and validate sites to include in their database.
So far, the company has coded in results for about 4,000 search terms with the goal of having 10,000 by the end of this year and 25,000 by the end of 2008. Right now they’re adding sites at the rate of about 500 search terms a week, according to Eric Stevens, director of user experience. Even 25,000 is tiny compared with other search engines, but if they pick their terms correctly, they’ll cover the vast majority of what people actually search for.
One of the reasons for Mahalo, according to Calacanis, is that results from Google and other machine search engines have been affected by individuals and businesses that have a vested interest to “game” those sites. He’s referring to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that cause a site’s rating on Google and other search engines to increase based not on the site’s importance, relevance or popularity, but on tricks that Web operators use to increase their ranking.
The result, says Calacanis, is “spam,” a term he’s using not to refer to junk e-mail, but junk results including sites that are deceptive or contain overbearing advertising, advertorials, malicious software or phishing techniques to defraud users.
When you type the word “Paris” into Google you get 503,000,000 results. When you type the same word into Mahalo you get an organized page with categories such as “Paris basics,” “Paris for Expats,” “Paris History” and so on.
There is also a link to “Paris Restaurants,” which includes “the Mahalo top 7,” reviews from Fodors, Time Out Travel, Frommers and other sources as well as a list of recommended restaurants broken down by price.
Of course, there’s also a prominent “Did you mean Paris Hilton?” Mahalo also provides the name and a link to the bio of the person who compiled the page so you know whom to thank or blame for the information.
While Mahalo will never have the breadth or depth of Google, Ask or any other machine-based search engine, it does offer something that is valuable – results examined by human editors who can use their eyes and brains to do things that machines can’t yet do all that well by peering into a site, checking its credibility and making a thoughtful decision as to whether it belongs in a listing.
It’s by no means a replacement for Google but for those of us looking for relevant information, it could turn out to be a major time saver.
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