Neowin.net - People Power Fuels New Search Engine

People Power Fuels New Search Engine

Posted by Emil Protalinski on 01 June 2007 - 01:17 · 8 comments & 3662 views

Backed by a group of investors with impressive track records, Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo into alpha stage – a search engine that does not rely on computers to scan the Web and does not use sophisticated algorithms to pull up meaningful results. Mahalo, which in Hawaiian means Thank You, relies on about 40 employees to track down the best responses to some of the Web's most repeated requests. The findings are boiled down to a series of lists pointing to the most helpful Web sites. Calacanis believes typical web search engines have too many irrelevant sites because marketing consultants and mischief makers have learned how to trick the machine-driven algorithms. The site is starting with just 4,000 Web pages. Although Calacanis hopes to add about 500 additional pages per week, and is aiming to address the Web's 10,000 most popular search terms, at that rate it will never reach close to the number of sites competitors "manage".

"When we have the results (to a query), it's going to be 10 times better than Google or Yahoo," boasted Calacanis. Mahalo hopes to eventually make money from selling ads alongside its search results, although Calacanis says he already has secured enough financing to last four or five years without turning a profit. He declined to provide how much money he has raised. Mahalo's list of investors includes: Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz, who backed both Yahoo and Google; Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who became a billionaire after selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo during the dot-com boom; AOL Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis, who also owns the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals; and Elon Musk, co-founder of online payment service PayPal Inc.

Link: Mahalo | FAQ

News source: Physorg

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(2 replies) #1 Posted by episode on 01 Jun 2007 - 01:44: So it sounds like the 'employees' of this company just go and google whatever the 'most repeated requests' are.

#2 Posted by NickFritz on 01 Jun 2007 - 04:43: So they have replaced the computer spiders with human spiders

I'd love to see the biast opinions of some random person determine what is relevant to what i search

Failure before it even begins I say.

This is pretty much what DMOZ does but dmoz doesn't call themselves a search engine

#3 Posted by eAi on 01 Jun 2007 - 17:36: Google essentially already does this with Google Co-op. If you search for Flu for example, you get a set of categories of site. The sites in those categories are recommended by doctors and so on...

#4 Posted by Samboini on 01 Jun 2007 - 18:43: Haha good luck on them when they come to manually searching requests such as beastiality!

#5 Posted by JiveMasterT on 03 Jun 2007 - 04:15: Doesn't chacha do this already?

http://search.chacha.com/

#6 Posted by cMendoza on 03 Jun 2007 - 13:40: it looks like a prettified craig's list... (click on a link on that page)

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