Mahalo plans to pay users who add “topic pages” to search engine
Mahalo, the underdog search engine that depends on human-generated content for a spam-free experience, has decided to pay users who add more content to its network. Right now it only has 100,000 pages in its system and draws 5 million unique monthly users. The only way it will grow is if it leverages its userbase to expand its horizons.
To do so, the Santa Monica, Calif. company says it will allow users who create and maintain… Continue Reading
Roundup: Twitter’s lack of youth, Google Local’s new dashboard, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Young adults not embracing Twitter (yet) – The microblogging service has found an older audience than Facebook’s early users.
Google Local gives small businesses their own web dashboard – The dashboard, designed to lure businesses to claim their profiles on Local, will deliver something akin to Google Analytics.
Later-stage valuations tumble – During the first quarter of 2009, the median valuation for a later-stage venture deal fell 43 percent compared to the same period last year, according… Continue Reading
Semantic search engine Evri cuts staff by 25 percent
Evri, the search engine that lets you track keyword results across the web, confirmed today that it has cut its staff by 25 percent to better weather the economic downturn. Chief executive Neil Roseman says the Seattle-based company is doing well, having recently landed two major partnerships, but that it’s necessary to trim costs in case the market slumps further.
“We’re in a tough market, and we want to be prudent for our investors,” he says…. Continue Reading
Roundup: Brin backs Parkinson’s study, iPhone gets shakable ads, and more
Google co-founder backs major Parkinson’s study – Sergey Brin says he plans to contribute money and DNA to a study run by his wife Anne Wojcicki’s startup 23andMe.
Dockers introduces shakable iPhone ad — Users can shake their iPhones to make urban street dancer Dufon perform his moves. The ad was created by mobile ad company Medialets.
Twofish launches analytics platform for social games — The company’s Elements platform will help social game and virtual world developers understand and make… Continue Reading
Roundup: VC departure complications, Facebook ToS issues not stopping growth, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Pierre Lamond’s departure from Sequoia: It’s complicated — The famed venture capitalist left top investing firm Sequoia Capital earlier this week to join fellow investor Vinod Khosla — but his defection doesn’t appear to have been as amicable as it first appeared, and the relationship between Lamond and Khosla is still being sifted out, according to peHUB.
A bad new record — It’s official, the market has fallen further and faster than it did in… Continue Reading
Jason Calacanis’ “Project A” is surprisingly compelling Mahalo Answers
Today, Jason Calacanis launches Mahalo Answers — the latest project from Mahalo, his “human powered search engine”. Mahalo Answers is a possibly clever cross between Yahoo’s free-wheeling Q&A bonanza at Yahoo Answers, and Google’s highly researched pay-to-play Google Answers service, which was closed down two years ago.
A year and a half ago on Valleywag, a Nostradamus-esque Tim Faulkner (disclosure: I worked with Tim at the now-semi-defunct tech tabloid) somehow predicted this particular product. In a… Continue Reading
RIP: The Controlled Message
[Editor's Note: It's been several weeks since Sequoia Capital's ominous meeting with its portfolio companies warning of tough times ahead. Not much has changed since, but the message has sunk in across Silicon Valley. While Sequoia was full of directives for withstanding the downturn -- many illustrated by scary looking charts -- communications consultant Lou Hoffman says its advice might be overlooking the obvious. Below, he offers up some common sense to skittish startup execs.]
Most… Continue Reading
Startup depression brings job cuts to Mahalo
Tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis announced today that his “people-powered search engine” Mahalo has laid off slightly less than 10 percent of its staff.
By making the cuts, Mahalo can extend its “runway” to profitability, which is necessary with the economic downturn and the resulting disappearance of ad dollars. Now the company could keep going beyond 2012 even if it doesn’t bring in any ad revenue, Calacanis writes.
Mahalo’s search results are created by employees, rather than automatically… Continue Reading
Roundup: European leaders agree on rescue plan, Microsoft to release Silverlight 2 and more
Here’s the latest action:
European leaders agree on financial rescue plan — The move will involve the injection of billions of Euros into banks in Germany, France and other countries. It was spurred by a similar British plan announced last week.
Memeorandum Colors visualizes political bias — The new Firefox extension/Greasemonkey script identifies the bias of the different publications on political news aggregator site Memeorandum.
Microsoft to release Silverlight 2 on Monday? — The company says it has “a significant announcement… Continue Reading
Roundup: Online display ads are weak, controversial Knol, and more
Online display ads not so much better than print ads — In one of the hardest-hitting pieces yet this year on the online advertising industry, AdAge’s Abbey Klaassen dissects the perils of the display (banner) advertising business. In a nutshell, online banner ads that appear next to online content aren’t much more effective than, well, print ads that appear next to print content. In order for that to change, Group M Interaction chief executive Rob Norman… Continue Reading
Search Wikia takes a step closer to the promise of ’search meets Wikipedia’
When the guy behind Wikipedia launches a search engine, the world is going to watch. And watch they did when Jimmy Wales unveiled Search Wikia in January — perhaps a little too closely. I say that because while some were expecting to see a “Google-killer“, the site we saw was a bare-bones engine in the very early alpha testing stage.
But now, it’s getting closer.
I got a chance to play with some of the upcoming changes… Continue Reading
Niche social networks welcome: Wikia open-sources social tools
Community wiki-building site Wikia, has announced that it’s allowing its social networking platform to become open source. This will allow anyone to easily create a social community complete with profiles, avatars, friending, etc… within their MediaWiki-based wiki sites.
For a good example of a social network built into a wiki-based site, check out ArmchairGM, the sports wiki database, which Wikia purchased in December of 2006 for more than $2 million (our coverage). This site prominently features… Continue Reading
People-powered search engine Mahalo may be growing fast
We’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… Continue Reading
Human powered search engine Mahalo raising $20M
[Update: This story is confirmed]
Mahalo, the search engine that is powered by humans — furiously writing up results on those topics frequently asked by searchers — is seeking to raise a $20 million round of financing at very high valuation, we’re told.
We’re hearing Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis wants potential investors to value his company at $175 million, before they invest, which is lofty considering the company reportedly has less than 1.5 million monthly unique users.
Calacanis… Continue Reading
Will Google get trounced by upstarts TechMeme, Facebook?
updated
Robert Scoble, the tech blogger, has drawn a lot of attention with a talk about why Google is beginning to fail as a search engine, and how upstarts may eat its lunch within a few years.
It is provocatively titled Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years, and here’s first video of a series (we’ve embedded it below, after the jump).
His argument is solid for the most part. Google’s… Continue Reading
Roundup: Skype’s offer, Calacanis, Acoona, Zoho, Bluebet, Tafiti, WikiScanner, more
Here’s the latest action:
Skype trying to buy back customer love — Skype is sending out notes to users saying they’ll get a week’s worth of free service. The San Jose Internet phone company says it has 196 million users and reported earlier this year that it was profitable for the first time. As Jeff Nolan points out, its users now number 3 percent of the world’s population, and only just now profitable?
Jason Calacanis, the scrappy entrepreneur —… Continue Reading
Mahalo: If you can’t beat them, follow them
Mahalo, the search engine that relies on humans to organize results around popular search returns, has released a toolbar that gives you supplemental results to the ones you get from Google.
The new release by Mahalo, launched by scrappy entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, is called Mahalo Follow, and is a download to your desktop that lets you see Mahalo’s human-edited results alongside those of Google and other sites.
It does that by creating a sidebar on the left… Continue Reading
Google’s rickety search engine, the challengers and Microsoft stealth project
Google has provided a NYT reporter rare access to some secrets of Google’s search engine. Unfortunately, it’s like in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothee’s dog Tito pulls away the curtain exposing something that is much less impressive than you’d hoped.
We’re so used to hearing about Google’s perfect algorithm, which has a 500 million variables (according to Google’s site).
But the New York Times’s Saul Hansell writes up a good description of what appears to… Continue Reading