Jason Calacanis has announced the launch of Mahalo Greenhouse, a new program expanding the Mahalo Guide program to part times guides.
The new program allows members of public to build search results for search terms not currently included in Mahalo. If accepted, participants will be paid $10 to $15 per search result.
Further details are available here.
Mahalo launched 2 weeks ago with a human indexed search engine powered by the Wikimedia CMS. Mahalo shares similarities with Wikipedia and Netscape. The company is funded by Sequoia Capital, where Calacanis was previously Entrepreneur in Action.
Company profile is here.
There is an interview with him on Battellemedia regarding updates on his project
Well. Emerging startups are trying to bite a piece of the Search Engine space cake from all sides. Google has been holding the search space for such a long time…it is really irritating all the startups and they want to somehow put a dent on this segment and make their mark. Hope fully there will be someone who will come out with more innovative searc engine which will break the dominance of Google…
but user driven and user rated search model , especially where the user is compensated cannot be a longterm sustainable model.
understand this:
when a user searches something…it is something he/she does not know…
a search engine has to anyway index all possible search combinations…
so when the search engine is depending on the user driven content, it is basically limiting itself to a subset of the search results..
that were my thoughts…
This is a great idea, the right product for it’s time. Searching the search engines is a frustration experience and paying people to sift through the web is a great way built your product.
Okay…. looks like his concept of paying user like he did at netscape continues with his next venture.
$10 per search result isn’t chump change; it looks to me like Mahalo better take off, otherwise it’ll have a lot of money to owe.
I bet that people in the outsourcing countries will be all over this immediately.
Gary – he has big pockets so I am sure he can pay for years without worrying about it.
The issue of bias that I wrote about on CN just grew exponentially.
Calcanis has gone mad.
Firstly, for standard search results i.e. Dating, Plumbing, NHL results etc Google works just fine – its not broken.
Unusual searches are usually triggered by real time events or news – and Mahalo (being a human edited engine) is ALWAYS going to be behind the times.
Neil:
Compare the search for Paris Hotels on Mahalo to Google.
Compare the search for Flatpanel TV on Mahalo to Yahoo.
Compare the search result for WWDC on Mahalo to Ask.
Mahalo is FASTER than machine search at breaking news. Look at a breaking story like WWDC or JFK Terror Plot… those were built in real time as those event broke.
Look at the Sopranos Final Episode SERP as well… best content anywhere on the web!
have you even looked at the site?!?
best jason
I wish I could short this.
http://www.mahalo.com/Apple
Where is gizmodo? I guess only your boys at engadget cover apple.
Where is the CN page I asked for?
And compare:
Paris hotels on Mahalo to Paris hotels on Trip Advisor.
Patrick with a 2handed jam.
Whats the difference between this and oozm.com which started few years ago that allowed the humans to index search results for the first time?
Yes $10-$15 is not a small change and this company must make a lot in return to pay off.
Allen,
Mahalo for the feedback!
1. RE: Gizmodo on Apple SERP please suggest it! Gizmodo is on http://www.mahalo.com/Ipod and http://www.mahalo.com/wwdc. There is no favoritism of any blogs on Mahalo–we pick the best blog (as best we can).
2. CN? What exactly do you want?! We’ll do it!
3. RE: Paris Hotels on Mahalo vs. TRipAdvisor I agree! I also agree that Fodors, Frommers, and the NYT are better for Paris Hotels than Mahalo. However, our job is not to compete with the destinations, our job is to get you to the best destinations. Compare our Paris Hotels to Google or Yahoo and you’ll see a huge difference. We’re not the destination, we’re the guide.
Mahalo for the feedback and checking out Mahalo!
best jason
Calacanis is a very strange character. He takes the concept of “social”, and thinks “pay people to be social”.
If Jason ran TechCrunch, he’d pay people for their comments. If he ran Wikipedia, he’d pay people for publishing pages. If he ran Digg, he’d pay people to submit stories. (Oh.. wait.)
He hasn’t figured out that successful communities are built organically. They’re successful because people don’t have to be paid to use them! They want to use them.
Oh well – Mike, you’ve got yourself another Deadpool candidate.
Paul: read the website. You can work for free on the Greenhouse and donate the money to the Wikipedia. So, you get to participate for free and help pay for the servers over at Wikipedia… how could that be a bad thing?
Mahalo for the feedback,
Jason
Duncan – I think you are supposed to put a disclaimer that this post is from a TC associate. I am sure we will continue to see mahalo pushed hard in a positive way here.
Mahalo for continuing to push this hunk of waste of server space.
Jason: I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m saying that it’s a pretty good measure of how good your service is, to not have to pay people to contribute.
Also, bringing in monetary incentives is icky. It’s like “Earn $$$ from home!”. It doesn’t give people a good impression, and it creates an air of (ironically) cheapness.
Just make it a service that people want to use, and would like to contribute to, without thinking “What’s in it for me?”. That’s the mark of a truly successful site – Digg is an example, as is Wikipedia.
I don’t know guys. I think it’s early to say whether or not this site will be successful. I think it needs to be built out yet.
I agree with Paul’s assessment: money = ickyness. Sure, I understand its a way to kickstart community contributions, but you’d hope that a community worth being a part of would grow and evolve organically without the need for “incentivization.”
Additionally, as Allen has pointed out, the issue of bias is going to come to a head. As I’ve noted before, search engine credibility comes in part from the perception of objectivity.
Is this news worthy? No.
I have watched over the past year as TechCrunch has turned from a news source into a publicity platform for Michael Arrington’s friends and investments. We all know that Jason Calacanis is partnering with you guys for the TechCrunch conference, but do you really have to give him a traffic bump for every tiny feature he releases?
I used to cringe when people would accuse you guys of a conflict of interests in the comments section of a post. Like when Michael would plug EdgeIO in posts completely unrelated to classifieds. But now I’m starting to realize that it’s not all bs, that there is some glad handing going on behind the scenes, whether you all will admit it or not.
Also, it’s clear to all of us that you guys are abandoning the sort of coverage that first helped you to become popular—startup coverage—and starting to cover more general industry news. And that’s fine—it’ll help you to draw a bigger audience and increase your revenue. But as one of the early adopters, it’s sad to see one of the old standby’s drop it’s bread and butter just to pad the bottom line.
Maybe I’m just bummed that I’m having to switch to other sources to find startup and emerging technology news.
I’ll second the prediction that Mahalo’s days are numbered. When Jason runs out of money or realizes the futility of paid editors trying to organize the world’s information versus algorithms by the world’s smartest brains. Hint Jason: there is a reason why Google rose to prominence with an algorithm and not an army of human editors. Instead of using a Hawaiian term for yet another ill-fated search engine, Jason should be on the beach in Hawaii sipping fruity drinks. Money would be much better spent.
Cha-cha offers human guides to help search results, dmoz offers human editors for years and yet Jason thinks Mahalo is somehow revolutionary? Dumb. This will go over like Seth Godin’s Squidoo. No thanks.
Wow it is amazing how wrong you all are. This is a great idea/model. There are tons of graduate students and people like myself all over the world who would love to contribute to Mahalo and get paid for it. It’s not a “social” thing as you all are claiming — it’s outsourced expertise and paying ONLY for good output. It makes perfect sense.
The other thing you all have to realize: The Mahalo results pages are incredibly SEO friendly, and will ultimately start to be the top search results for a given term on Google.
Dan
Dan – Even though I know that Jason made Mahalo for the Google play – he said on CN that this was not his motivation.
Wait until the stories start that xyz mahalo guide was paid off to put abc link in place 1. Oh those stories will be all over valleywag.
This is actually pretty smart. I’m guessing the average warm body can make a decent page of results in about 30 minutes of googling, and any of the free keyword tools will provide an unending supply of fodder. That’s $20 an hour…the poster above is right, this will be a new cottage industry.
And it’s also free SEO – get paid to make pages for your clients; from the client and from Mahalo. This is an SEO dream.
How long before the above two influences combine to make crappy results?
i signed up / why not / write a search a day / get 80% acceptance / and $200/mo
– that is if I get acepted (not likely)
Dan, if this is the case: “The other thing you all have to realize: The Mahalo results pages are incredibly SEO friendly, and will ultimately start to be the top search results for a given term on Google.”
Then … why aren’t more Squidoo results top? It was the same basic premise as Mahalo.
I’ll tell you why: you have to get other sites to link to you, it’s not just about having a page that is SE friendly. A major reason why so many Wikipedia results top the SE results is because of the amount of linkage from other sites.
Maybe I’ll be wrong, but I don’t see sites en masse linking to aggregation pages that links to sources. Sure, there will be some cases where linking to a good, well updated (and I’m not sure how good they can possibly be for updating) page. It’s like linking to digg that links to the source. A collection of links is one thing, but by itself it’s not very valuable. They need to provide some editiorial beyond the links themselves and become link-friendly content other than just links.
Instead, Mahalo is more like a search result page itself which Google has said repeatedly that they frown on linking prominently to lists of search engine result pages. They block their own search results pages. This could be the achille’s heel for Mahalo at the end of the day.
well, you already know what i think about mahalo, but this is a NEW low – absolutely moronic, destined for failure, dumbest content vehicle ev-ah (as in boston, ‘ever’) – didn’t they learn anything from about.com????
“Paying to build results is icky”.
Really? I’m pretty sure newspapers have been doing that for ages. Search term: today’s news. Search result: newspaper. Why shouldn’t editors/curators be paid for their work if they want to?
TDavid,
I hear you. I realize that it’s not enough to simply be SE friendly and that people have to link to you, but I believe that pages like this will ultimately be linked to in greater numbers than Wikipedia. The difference is that Wikipedia is narrative and Mahalo is largely bullet points; furthermore, the Wikipedia entries don’t always follow a set form, while Mahalo’s do. People like bullet points and Mahalo guarantees that the bullets are relevant and do exactly what they say they do.
I believe that destination pages like this will ultimately take over the web as more and more companies learn how to game search results. The web is moving from information to navigate to information given; it’s choices moving to answers, and we’ll eventually figure out how to push the junk to the side.
Mahalo and sites like it will become the new experts because they have people behind them. It’s not wisdom of the crowds and UGC –> it’s making the right filters and figuring out how to get the nuggets on the site in a massive way.
Why do I have a feeling that Mahalo is going to be the best porn search engine…
I think it’s balanced between success and failure.
Isn’t this what wikia is doing, and how often does Google return results with pages from find articles and zoominfo.
Google might not like it, but something that is edited can have a value beyond automated algorithmic results.
If there’s a way to filter spammers and hustlers. It could sit well alongside wikipedia and digg.
Also, when people dismiss Mr. Calacanis for using monetary gain, they forget that , yes while it may be more natural for people to come to your community, all the successful communities on the web have generally taken years and years to reach critical-mass, whereas Jason is an entrepreneur who know that money is a primary motive for most of the worlds people, let alone young web-users with time.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
Stupid idea. Looks like people will just try to take advantage of it to try and make a few quick bucks, but it won’t actually end in a good search engine.
I think this could be pretty interesting, but for a slightly different area. For purposes of illustration – let me call it “slow search”.
Slow search is something where I’m ok with the result coming back in say 5 days, but in summary and aggregate form. Basically outsourced research and summarization.
That doesnt mean though that it would be mapped to the most common terms that people would search for, in fact, the idea is that it would be relevant for people trying to find collective information on a specialized topic. I have mentioned this in the linked-in response to Jason’s question, and I still assert — Mahalo should make it really easy for people to do this, by providing a clippings and other similar facility that can be edited, reviewed and approved for inclusion easily.
On a somewhat related note, Kosmix.com seems to be focusing on a vertical search engine but doesn’t seem to be using the human powered approach. I don’t work there btw. It just seems with all the talk about Mahalo lately, the Kosmix guys probably deserve a mention too.
Rohan,
Thanks for the shout out – I’m a product manager at Kosmix, and if you’ve looked at our pages recently, you’ll see very clearly that we’ve built a content categorization engine – if you think that sounds wonky, check out http://www.kosm...Health/anemia-s. We create categories in an algorithmic fashion and are able to expose “related topics” for a particular keyword. An example of a related topic is cystic fibrosis ==> burkholderia, a highly unobvious semantic leap that GOOG and others (and Mahalo) cannot expose. Give it a whirl!
didn’t they learn anything from about.com????
Have to note this comment– About.com is currently a top 25 web property, and sold to Primedia in the last bubble for $700m.
If that happened again, say 2 years from now, Mr. Calacanis would net something like (guessing wildly here) $150m, a far sight better then then $15m net for Weblogs Inc.
uh huh, and then they took a bath and in 2005 the ny times co paid about 400 million for it – good move primeda! kurnit’s original vision was unique, yahoo-esque if you will, usurped a bit by dmoz’s larger volunteer base and ultimately constrained because of the number of sources available on myriad topics…in this case, you need look no further than the nytimes co’s ability to fuck everything up to see where about.com is headed with this parent, their 500ish guides and all of that…
sorry. if you want to play the optics game, that ‘purchase number’ is nice to look at…but if you bother to look at how money is made then you’ll be reading a different story…
The Sopranos final episode SERP is extremely impressive. There is a ton of content aggregated on the page; content which I spent hours scurrying around the web for over the last few days. Mahalo for the heads-up. For this particular page, excellent work.
(Tony lives!)
Cortland: Mahalo for pointing out the power of humans using machines vs. machines alone. Clearly things like our WWDC and Sopranos Final Episode search show how we can be MUCH better than Google, Yahoo, and Ask.
We can’t win every battle, but I think there is a place in the world for what we are doing.
best j
Note: for some reason Neil came up as my name… I think because i was respond to neil and my browser dumped me into the email field first. anyway, that Neil above sign “best j” is me… Jason Calacanis obviously
Why pay $15.00 bucks if you can outsource this entire operation to India at a dollar per search term?Remember that we are not talking about creating real content , just reading Google results, removing the SPAM – all very mechanical and repetitive operations.
Mahalo intends to index the top 10.000 search terms, that is just 150K @ 15.00 per term.Do you really need Sequoia cash to finance that?Or the money will be used to finance an “old bubble” style spending extravaganza?
There is not a real entry barrier for this model.
I will eventually fail.
It will fail… Not -I will fail-, although I may fail, who knows…
I did this same project for Shopping.com back in 1998, Same deal I got paid $27 per hour to build search results pages. What is Shopping.com doing now?
Thanks for the post, good info.