Comments on: Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search

By: People-Powered Search Engine Mahalo Cranks Up the Crowdsourcing

People-Powered Search Engine Mahalo Cranks Up the Crowdsourcing — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:40:37 +0000

[...] it launched dual years ago, the self-described human-powered poke engine Mahalo has relied upon the staff of [...]

By: BusinessWeek » Blog Archive » People-Powered Search Engine Mahalo Cranks Up the Crowdsourcing

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:05:42 +0000

[...] it launched two years ago, the self-described human-powered search engine Mahalo has relied upon a staff of [...]

By: Search engines still haven’t figured it out — Shooting at Bubbles

Search engines still haven’t figured it out — Shooting at Bubbles — Sat, 30 May 2009 07:23:07 +0000

[...] site and very responsive to queries not mention that it is also getting a lot of press from the big boys of the tech blogosphere. Out of curiosity I click on the Twitter link under the Technology heading [...]

By: Nokia 5800

Nokia 5800 — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:53:32 +0000

4,000 results pages they created so far, I guess I can switch from Google if my query matches one of those 4,000. Idea doesn’t make sense, why would I switch from Google to this? Are these guides experts or are they just doing Google searches and picking out which results they like and then adding it?

By: Mahalo Search Engine Launches. And Everyone Laughs.

Mahalo Search Engine Launches. And Everyone Laughs. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:45:25 +0000

[...] is a lot of coverage out there, including Andy, Tech Crunch, ZDNet, Threadwatch, Mashable, and Search Engine Land to name a [...]

By: perde

perde — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:16:05 +0000

nice

By: Mahalo creates a FarkCNNipedia with it’s latest redesign

Mahalo creates a FarkCNNipedia with it’s latest redesign — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:05:50 +0000

[...] like they’re pushing it even farther. When they first launched, Mahalo was claimed to be Human-Powered Search, but here lately it seems like they’ve become a more well-rounded news [...]

By: Mahalo Sets Out To Liveblog The World

Mahalo Sets Out To Liveblog The World — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:00:24 +0000

[...] Mahalo launched about 16 months ago, we called it a human-powered search engine and began thinking of it as a Google competitor. But it’s so-called “guide pages” [...]

By: Mahalo at nyc.locationscout.us

Mahalo at nyc.locationscout.us — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:40:21 +0000

[...] Some cred is due with regard to the fact that internet icon Jason Calacanis is behind this startup [...]

By: Mahalo Has Competition (YouBundle Secret Screen Shots)

Mahalo Has Competition (YouBundle Secret Screen Shots) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:34:07 +0000

[...] Like Mahalo, YouBundle is more of a Web guide than an actual search engine. Bundles of Web links, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Amazon product descriptions, and uploaded photos and documents are created around different topics. These can be anything from “VC Funding Resources” to “Tibetan Buddhism” to “Apple Rumors Sites.” Bundlers add titles, tags, and descriptions to each bundle. The company explains to beta testers in its guidelines: A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility. [...]

By: Weblogs, Inc. Co-Founder Brian Alvey To Launch Crowd Fusion

Weblogs, Inc. Co-Founder Brian Alvey To Launch Crowd Fusion — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:12:02 +0000

[...] Alvey co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Jason Calacanis. Calacanis launched his new startup, Mahalo, in May 2007. [...]

By: Mahalo: The Long Route To Wikipedia | TheVanBlog

Mahalo: The Long Route To Wikipedia | TheVanBlog — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:36:28 +0000

[...] Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search [...]

By: TechCoast Review of Mahalo

TechCoast Review of Mahalo — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:03:46 +0000

Mahalo Human Edited Search Engine…

..will Mahalo ever scale to the point of being valuable enough to…..

By: Mahalo Is Not Human-Powered Search; It’s A Collaborative Link Blog » the dotmatrix project

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:38:12 +0000

[...] 6 months, primarily through friends conversations out on the left coast and the occasional Scoble / Techcrunch / Winer ruminations. But when listening to Calacanis present Mahalo to Ed Cone and the audience [...]

By: Mahalo Greenhouse: Get Paid To Submit Search Results · Articles

Mahalo Greenhouse: Get Paid To Submit Search Results · Articles — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:55:03 +0000

[...] launched 2 weeks ago with a human indexed search engine powered by the Wikimedia CMS. Mahalo shares similarities with [...]

By: Bernard

Bernard — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:30:55 +0000

Is it the “world’s first human powered search?” Naver.com, in South Korea, has had it’s “knowledge” search for years.

By: SAY-HO! » Blog Archive » Calacanis startet "Mahalo"

SAY-HO! » Blog Archive » Calacanis startet "Mahalo" — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 08:22:01 +0000

[...] Jason Calacanis hat nun endlich veröffentlicht, was hintern seinem bisher geheimen “Project X” steckt. Es handelt sich um eine “human-powered” Suchmaschine mit dem Namen “Mahalo“. Die Site ist bis jetzt im Alpha-Status. Derzeit lässt sich noch nicht so viel zu dem Projekt sagen. Mike Arrington hat ein bisschen dazu geschrieben. [...]

By: dabu

dabu — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:11:30 +0000

This is similar to mahalo – http://en.dabu.pl

However, it is more extended in polish version – http://dabu.pl

By: Mahalo: The Long Route To Wikipedia - TheVanBlog

Mahalo: The Long Route To Wikipedia - TheVanBlog — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 02:21:17 +0000

[...] Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 00:46:39 +0000

Dan (102): Right now all our Guides are fulltime staff and they all agree with the mission of helping users. The reason why folks at DMOZ started selling links IMHO is that they were putting in a lot of time and getting no compensation. The same thing happened at digg–folks working for free are going to be easier to corrupt than ones who are getting paid (sort of like underpaid government workers). Also, if someone on our staff was to take a bribe we would fire them–just the NYT or WSJ or PBS would.

Avi (101): Right now MediaWiki is doing just fine for us. We are going to see how it goes and customize the software as we go. We know about some of the easter eggs and if people can find them that’s fine with us. Editorial content is better than Google because we use a human to a) take out all the spam, b) organize the links, and c) look for things that are not obvious (i.e. give context). Also, it’s not Google vs. a Mahalo Guide. it’s Google vs. a Mahalo Guide using Google, Ask, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Wikipedia and dozens of other quality services.

Mahalo for the feedback!

Jason

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:03:44 +0000

Jason- How do you plan to keep this from turning into the ultra-corrupt enviorment that the DMOZ ( http://www.dmoz.org ) currently is in? If it gets to any decent size in traffic, sought out keywords like viagra, mortgages and other terms would be sought out after, and would likely be biased.

By: Avi

Avi — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:02:03 +0000

Jason,

Do you plan on actually writing your own software or are you going to continue using mediawiki to power mahalo. Also why do you think editorialized content or guides for search results is more meaningful then Google (algorithmic results) or user-generated results?

Also, you guys should look into locking down mediawiki even further as with some clever url editing, you can get to some pages I’m sure you don’t want users to see.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 06:36:30 +0000

Vincent (#99): forgive us for being so US centric. This is a huge project and just getting the top 10,000 terms in the US done is going to take us a year. We’re going to do the best we can to be non-US centric in the future… provided we can proof the model out in the US market!!!

RonP (#93): Thanks so much for the background on LookSmart and MSN. Obviously we did our homework and know all about the history of GNN, Michael Wolf, LookSmart, ODP/DMOZ, ResultsAbout, About.com, and the Yahoo Directory. However, we believe that a LOT has changed since that time. First, machine-based search is suffering from an overload of both good, bad, and horrible sites fighting it out for placement. Users are getting frustrated and you can see that when you do a search for any product, travel, or health search. It’s a mess. Also, there is a way to make money today and in 1996-2001 there really wasn’t. Also, people are spending more and more time searching. What we’re doing is going to be years of hard work, and I do think that churn of the Guides is going to be a challenge… however, I had 300 bloggers at Weblogs, Inc. and many of them are still blogging away at sites like Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq–three years later! We are at this for the long term and if you come back in six months I think you’ll see the product really improve.

By: Vincent McBurney

Vincent McBurney — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:33:15 +0000

I don’t understand why people are questioning the expertise of the site editors. It is obvious from looking at a few topics that they are experts – experts on US sports, US television, US movies, US food, Bollywood actors and places US holidaymakers can visit when they are overseas.

They have the Democrat Party but not the British Conservative Party, a search on Football takes you to an NFL page, they have Kirk Cameron but not Alec Guinness, they have Gsa Gsa Gabor but not Charles Dickens. They have Clinton but a search for Kohl – chancellor of Germany during reunification – takes me to a page about eyeliner. Now that’s quality search right there.

Am I the only person insulted by the US ring fencing in this site?

By: socialham.com

socialham.com — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:16:56 +0000

Meet Some of the Mahalo Guides…

After spending some more time with Mahalo I started to take a look at a few of the Guides. Who are these people? Jason is pretty well known for hiring the right people (and they must like him because they jump from company to company with him) so who d…