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Mahalo.com, the latest company from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, launched, with a stripped-down search engine designed to handle only the most popular requests in widely appealing categories.
Focused on areas such as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports — and filtered with the help of a team of 40 employees in Santa Monica, Calif. — the limited results are meant to avoid the spam and other junk results that clog up the other search engines. They aim to fulfill the Web’s most repeated requests.
By cherry-picking only the most popular 10,000 search terms, it can organize results in the form of a more organized, thoughtful list about your search term’s attributes.
The challenge here, though, is that dozens of other search engines have launched to tackle specialized search already, including shopping search engines, job search engines, travel engines and engines like Hakia that organize results in similar ways to Mahalo. Moreover, there are other sites that provide real people to help assist in searches, such as ChaCha.com. Finally, Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success.
However, Calacanis, who co-founded Weblogs, a blogging network, sold to AOL for $25 million in 2005, says he has enough cash to tide him over for four or five years without turning a profit. Mahalo is backed by Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, News Corp., CBS Corp., Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, co-founder of online payment service PayPal.
It has completed 4,000 of the 10,000 planned pages. If you search for something Maholo doesn’t have the answer to, it defaults to Google’s results.
More details here.
Example for search term “Porsche 911″ below:
10 Comments
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Adam Jusko said:
Seems to be almost exactly the same idea as Bessed.
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Gökhan Besen said:
How exactly do you relate Hakia and Mahalo search engines? I don’t see any corellation.
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Matt Marshall said:
Gokhan,
Check out Hakia and search for “Madonna,” and see how “gallery” format is very similar. To match apples to apples, type in “porsche 911″ into Hakia. Note the first listing, which directs you to the “gallery” for Porsche, which again shows a very similar format again to Mahalo’s.
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Tim Jones said:
What disappoints me about Mahalo is not the implementation - I think the look and feel is pretty good and it’s smart of Calacanis to focus his efforts on the top 10K search terms.
I guess I just expected a more exciting concept from Calacanis. Mahalo is just a retread of ideas that have been tried before - there’s really nothing innovative about it whatsoever. Doesn’t mean it won’t make Calacanis some money, but I think many of us were expecting something a bit more exciting and groundbreaking from him.
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Gökhan Besen said:
Matt, I see your point, but search engines are not only about visual presentations but more of technology behind. Hakia displays the results based on its own algorithm whereas Mahalo in their own words is “world’s first human-powered search engine” which is totally a different story and I think it’s brilliant. Involving users as co-developers in a search engine is the difference that Mahalo goes after, and that shouldn’t be confused with presentational aspects or similarities that any other search engine has. That’s where I stand. Very nice article btw.
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Matt Marshall said:
Gokhan, it is not the world’s first human-powered search engine. It has been done before.
Getting user-generated links, that is new, but will it be as organized as Jimmy Wales’ coming effort? We’ll see…
Matt
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TOM ZOOKN said:
What you think guys about http://www.iloggo.com, Polish based “web desktop and bookmarking service” ?
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dabu said:
This is similar to mahalo - http://en.dabu.pl
However, it is more extended in polish version - http://dabu.pl
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Kathryn said:
I like the idea of not having to surf through the useless pages that some of the engines turn up. I look forward to the day that its no longer Alpha.
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Nathan said:
Very interesting idea, very similar to a web directory, but more like a web directory on steroids.
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Daniel said:
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Mahalo.com emerges as yet another search engine, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
2 Trackbacks
9:22 am
The Blogosphere In Uproar Over Slew of Major Announcements said:
[...] What does the rest of the blogosphere think about it? Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success. - VentureBeat [...]
11:26 am
VentureBeat » Human powered search engine Mahalo raising more money said:
[...] See previous coverage here. [...]