People-powered search engine Mahalo may be growing fast

January 10, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

mahalologo011008.pngWe’ve been skeptical of Mahalo in the past, because it’s not clear how the “human-powered search engine” could be more accurate than — or gain market share from — algorithm-based search engines like Google.

Today, web analytics firm Hitwise has an interesting post showing traffic to Mahalo rising sharply over the past few months (see graph below). The site has gone from a zero percent market share of total US internet traffic earlier this year, to .0023 percent this past week. Hitwise’s graph, below, compares Mahalo with search startup rival ChaCha.

Mahalo has staffers who create sets of search results by hand, for popular search terms. These search results include links to other sites on the web; the company also recently started letting users suggest links to be added to results (our coverage).

hitwisemahalo3011008.png

The context for these numbers: Mahalo ranked 69th among search engines, last week, and received 0.02% of all US search engine traffic, compared with Google’s 55.52%.

hitwisemahalo2011008.pngMaholo’s users tend to be younger. The graph, left, divides Mahalo’s visitors by age group, and compares it to the average age distribution of US visitors to web sites — 18-24 year olds were 36.67 percent more likely to be on Mahalo.com than average. Hitwise says most people use Mahalo and then go to entertainment or news sites — especially gaming sites. I’m going to take a wild guess that most Mahalo users are young men, and they’re not just coming for human-powered search, they’re coming to check out the Mahalo Daily online geek television show, starring Veronica Belmont.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • mikeb
    The ceiling of Mahalo is clear: once you reach all the fools who get impressed by that first hit, you'll be done.
  • Great to see Mahalo doing so well :-)
  • Sam
    I have created an ebook that deciphers all of the coding and allows for anyone to achieve good results from their seo efforts. You can get real world results almost immediately. I will give away 50 copies of this book!

    Thanks,
    Sam
    www.GeeksGuideToSeo.info