While major search engines continue to tweak their algorithms and invest on sophisticated tools and computers to provide more relevant results, a group of 40 people led by Jason Calcanis, dot-com luminary and co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., puts up what is claimed to be the “first human-powered search engine.”
Mahalo, which is Hawaiian for Thank You, is the newest search engine to grace our online experience with handpicked search results to some of the web’s most repeated requests in various categories such as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports. Calacanis has powerful financial backers, including News Corp., CBS Corp., Sequoia Capital, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. The company plans to make money through online ads.
Calcanis believes that while Google and Yahoo are both successful directing their visitors to the right places, most of the results are packed with too much irrelevant sites brought about by spammers and mischief makers who manage to find their way around the robot-driven algorithms. Precisely what Mahalo hopes to address: to filter out spam and hand-craft the best search results possible.
At the moment, Jason Calcanis’ blog reads: “Mahalo.com is in ALPHA–that means not ready for users, but looking for feedback.” Now starting with just 4,000 web pages, Calcanis’ team aims to complete the web’s 10,000 most popular search terms before the year ends.
Originally posted on May 31, 2007 @ 6:01 am
Their results says that “current goal is to hand-write result pages for the top 10,000 search terms”. I hope the people writing don’t have any other online investments that might lead the results one way!
Shouldn’t the motto be “We’re here to help (if you are American)”. Mostly American movies, TV, sports etc. For example no category for cricket, rugby or soccer (only soccer players?). On Sports Team page no Man U or AC Milan even though Google Trends has Man U getting more searches than most NFL teams and level with the Yankees. In TV Beauty and the Geek but not Dr. Who, Neighbours or the Bill. Also amusing to note Kirk Cameron has a page but Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness don’t.
Way to shrink the web.