Mahalo: User friendly
Rather than discover a new marketplace, Mahalo is trying to rethink the search result. With Google, we get the most popular linked-to sites (approximately) related to our search. A few of the top 10 might be no good, so we scroll past them and onto the next page. We might even go a few pages before we find what we want. Mahalo wants that first page of links to be practically definitive.
In essence, Mahalo is a community-involved search engine, with the editorial team creating individual pages -- based on popular search data -- listing the best possible links, all tested and useful. Mahalo encourages users to take part in improving those search results by submitting pages and links themselves. The idea is to make every page complete and every link great, with no spam, repeats or other unrelated nonsense.
As Mahalo CEO and President Jason Calacanis explains it, "Our world view is that the future of search is equal parts search, content and social bookmarking. No one has threaded the needle on these three services yet, but whoever does figure it out will have a $10 billion business." It stands to reason he's betting his company can do it.
"We have almost 100,000 pages, and we are ramping up to the point at which we can do thousands a week (if we wanted to)," says Calacanis. "The future of search will be getting a hand-curetted result for the fat part of the long tail and machine/social results for the rest of the tail. So, it doesn't have to be all human all the time."
But he's still trusting humans to help bear the weight. By letting users online contribute pages and links, Mahalo is adopting the Wikipedia model, putting power into users' hands to improve their own experiences and the level of information they can obtain. People put value in that; it shows respect for and a willingness to work with the customer. That appeal could be a game-changer.
The main problem with Mahalo is that most search terms don't have pages yet. That will change over time, given that Mahalo is only 14 months old, and the editorial team is building new pages every day. Can Mahalo reach its goal of snagging between 1-5 percent of the search engine market in the next five years? It's unlikely, but no one saw Google coming either.
Still, Mahalo is under no misapprehension about its current place in the market. "We are not competitive with Google; we are partners," insists Calacanis. "Google is the operating system of the internet, and we are an application that sits on top of Google's platform." He sees Mahalo as complementary, not competitive. "Most folks use two to three search engines a month, so we only have to take 1 or 2 percent market share to have a huge, multibillion-dollar business. Of course, that will take years to do. It's a mistake to think that you have to get people to 'switch.'"
User involvement could change the way we search. With Wikipedia, user involvement certainly changed the way we looked for knowledge. With YouTube, it changed the way we watched videos online. With MySpace and the like, it changed how we kept in contact with friends. People want to be involved, and Google is ultimately a closed search system. Will Mahalo become a friendly place we can call home, at least now and then?
