People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) and the guidelines sent to beta testers (reproduced after the break).
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.
You should consider a bundle your work of art. . . . Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.
Unlike Mahalo, YouBundle does not rely on a paid staff of editors to create its topic guides. It is all done by the community. While Mahalo does incorporate some social feedback as well, it is more controlled. Each submission is reviewed before being included on a Mahalo page. This policy is one way to control spam from clogging up the system.
On YouBundle, the community does all the work. So in this sense it is more akin to Topicle or Wikia Search. The latter is a slightly different beast, since it truly is an algorithmic search engine whose results are re-ordered and modified by the community. But like Wikia Search, YouBundle relies on its community to flag spam and inappropriate content. Any bundles tagged “SPAM,” “PORN,” or “TOS,” are reviewed and moderated. (The TOS tag refers to bundles that violate the site’s Terms of Service).
The YouBundle community is also be able to vote the best topic pages up by “bumping” them, or vote them down by “dumping” them. Dumps are “anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps,” says the guideines. Members can also “bag and tag” other people’s bundles. Bagging a bundle is like bookmarking it as one of your favorites, and once you do that you can up to three tags to improve the categorization of the site.
I was not able to test the site out myself, so I can’t say if it is producing better results than Mahalo, Topicle or Wikia Search. But the steep rise in Mahalo’s traffic, much of it driven by the SEO juice its pages have, is no doubt a motivating factor here. According to comScore, Mahalo attracted 2.6 million unique visitors worldwide in April, up from zero when it launched last summer. Total pageviews were 5.6 million.
Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is a partner of ours who helps us put on the TechCrunch50 conference. Neither TechCrunch, its employees, nor Michael Arrington owns any stake in Mahalo.
