Mahalo Goes Social
Michael Arrington
29 comments »
New wiki-based search engine Mahalo is launching social networking features today at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris.
Mahalo is a search engine that focuses on user link submissions and an editorial process to theoretically produce better search results than algorithm-only engines like Google. It first launched in May 2007.
The company already pays users for quality submissions. Today, they are adding user profiles and other social networking features to further incentivize users to submit quality content.
Editors decide if links submitted for a particular search term should be inlcuded in search results. If a submission is accepted, the user gets credit and a higher score. If it’s banned, the user’s score takes a hit. All of the results are shown on a user profile (click image above to see larger version), so heavy users will be inclined to add new links carefully and increase their score. The service has around 26,000 pages of search results, and each one represents 10-30 different search queries. If a search returns no Mahalo pages, results from other search engines are shown. 1,000 or so new pages are created each week on the site, says CEO Jason Calacanis.
Mahalo has direct competition coming from Wikia. Based on early screen shots that show user profiles, Wikia seems to be taking a nearly identical approach to maximizing user participation.
Mahalo is doing very well based on early Comscore statistics, which report 2 million monthly page views and 874,000 unique visitors. More importantly, the trend is clearly towards fast growth. Compete statistics agree.
Mahalo has raised around $20 million on two rounds of financing. Another rumor says their last round was valued at over $100 million.
More information here:
http://www.mahalo.com/How_to_Use_Mahalo_Social
I can’t speak for anyone else, but the only reason I’ve ever set foot at Mahalo is because I enjoy the Mahalo Daily podcast. It’s a nice round-up of misc. interesting stories and how-tos.
Extremely Impressive! Mahalo sounds like Yahoo in 1997 but then updated for the Next Web. Cool…
Mike - how does adding profiles add any incentive to submit links? In reality it would make it harder to submit links.
Are you kidding us? Mahalo has raised $20 million and has a valuation of approx $100 million? That’s simply a joke!
I think Calacanis is one of the most insightful and entertaining commentators of the Web 2.0 world. I love his podcasts and when he’s on TWiT it’s that much more fun.
Mahalo’s big announcement is that its adding “social networking features?” Whatever, non-story.
Mike, you a nice friend of Jason’s to put this post up on Tech Crunch but as somebody looking in from a distance (I don’t live in the US), the whole scene is full of hot air.
Calacanis should be running a major PR company not trying to launch the next technology company. Stick to his strengths. Hell, Mahalo Daily proves my point. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
I love this site but it’s just Incredible, 20M for a website that can be easily build an maintained by a team of max. 5 FTE.
What are they going to do with all that cash?
And who on earth made that 100M valuation?
Mike,
I’m not convinced that you should be writing articles about Mahalo. Though you may not have a financial investment in the company, you have an important business relationship with Jason Calacanis. I think that this has a bearing over the tone of your articles on Mahalo. Correct me if I’m wrong…
And a valuation of $100 million already? Maybe we are in a bubble after all…
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Mike. Wiki-based search engine sounds much better than people-based search engine. At least it opens the door to some automation/innovation. Is that your term or Jason’s term.
Letting users decide what is important when it comes to search results is exactly what Uniseek is doing. Although we are doing it much differently than Mahalo, the idea is similar. Except ours requires no additional user action (something that I think would dictate sparse results at Mahalo for most search terms)
Google of course display results according to the authority of other websites. But this is not good way to index social websites and other non-static destinations (videos, music, job listings, dating profiles, television shows, real estate listings, etc).
Mahalo’s traffic starts going up, right when Veronica Belmont joins them.
First Hakia - now Mahalo. both are testing the integration of search and social networking. I think Hakia has done a better job with “Meet people who asked the same question”
My guess: The integration of search and social networking will be an interesting trend to follow in 2008. I think that we will see many different approaches. by the way, my idea of integrating search and social networking is called http://www.andunite.com (just a little bit of dumb surreptitious advertising)
There seems to be some spam in the user activity section =p
All thRUBUTYPECANCER@GMAIL.COM is is deception to do more advertising
If anyone would like to see video of Jason’s presentation check out:
http://www.socialham.com/2007/.....s-and-rss/
dmoz.org 2.0?
I visit mahalo because I enjoy the Mahalo Daily podcast. It’s a nice round-up of misc. interesting stories and how-tos.
#17 seems unusually similar to #2, which can only mean one thing:
Dan Ackerman Greenberg is among us!
That is amazing growth. Jason is smart in that he is able to work the long tail of the web by adding so many pages each week. It’s not about the best content as much as it is about having the most content. 1000 pages/week is astounding.
1000 pages / week is nothing for a UGC site. Anybody who has 1000 new members sign up weekly will have 1K new pages…because each user gets their own profile page.
I’d like Mahalo a LOT better (still wouldn’t use it) if they’d call themselves a “directory” instead of a search engine.
Search engines don’t create crawlable pages and get indexed in other search engines. Does Google index YST? Nope.
So, if Mahalo is really a search engine, they should prove it by denying robots to index their site.
Let’s see how well their “amazing traffic growth” is looking after they do that.
I’ll bet anybody here $1,000 (seriously) that if Mahalo blocks robots from crawling their search results page, their traffic drops by half, at least.
Arrington - but do you thinks it’s hot or not? What’s your opinion on this?
#20 Jeremy - just review my post - you will see that “vanessa hudgens nude” is their top search driver - so your question is already answered
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....esentation
Lets wait and see how this works out!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I think most of the growth is coming from search referrals from google…There is little chance that mahalo will be a typein destination site but may do well like with a SEO stratgey (like about.com).
i just tried mahalo for a half an hour and found it to be inadequate for work-based searches. i’m not giving up on this concept yet, but am getting close. google does the job fine.
@gopi -
No - the traffic is coming almost entirely from Mahalo’s own paid staff. If you look at the breakdown by subdomain, 40% of the traffic goes to the “Greenhouse” area where they coordinate with paid contractors for creation of new content, 40% goes to the main site, and 20% goes to guides.mahalo.com which I am guessing is a purely internal resource since, as of this writing, it is not routable from the outside world.
In other words - if you assume that folks working at Mahalo generate at least one page view on the primary TLD for each hit on the Greenhouse, which seems like a reasonable assumption, then almost the entirety of Mahalo’s traffic is generated by its own employees!
Color me unimpressed.
And I have to agree with the poster above that if Techcrunch is going to cover Jason’s venture they need to do it with the same level of critical journalism they would on any other venture - or risk damaging the TC brand.
/end rant
Interview of Jason Calacanis on Mahalo social
http://uk.intruders.tv/Le-Web3....._a260.html