What You Need To Know About Mahalo Search Engine In An Internet Marketing Viewpoint

If the truth shall have to be known then let’s admit that it’s not really the fact that Mahalo is the first “human-powered” search engine in the Internet that made waves but rather, all the buzz surrounding it is generated by none other than its entrepreneur owner Jason Calcanis.

The Origins of Mahalo, the First Human Powered Search Engine
Jason Calcanis is a man you either hate or love. He is better known for being the developer of Weblogs, which he later on sold to AOL for a reported cool twenty-five mil. But before that, he also made waves by launching a newsletter that later ended up as a trendy Silicon Valley magazine. Its success didn’t last long, however, and it ultimately refocused its interest in venture capital. And now, he’s making headlines again with his latest baby – Mahalo, the first human powered search engine.

Mahalo is the Hawaiian word for ‘thank you’ and Calcanis’ choice of name for his project has drawn lots of criticism since it was seen as another shameful attempt of Calcanis to copy Wikipedia, which also originated from a Hawaiian term.

Mahalo is presently powered by forty people or guides. The search engine’s primary goal is to provide people with the best hand-picked and most relevant results for the 10,000 most popular terms searched in the Internet. Most of these terms fall under popular categories like sports, entertainment, news, and travel. It has currently hand-selected search results for the top four thousand search terms and aim to add about five hundred a week.

When you use Mahalo to search for a certain term, you’ll come up with the Top 7 handpicked links along with additional information, called Fast Facts, that will let you know about the most important data tidbits regarding your search keyword and why the guides chose the following links. Underneath the Top 7 links will be the results generated by Google. If there are no handpicked results for the search term yet then it will only display those produced by Google.

Interaction will play an important role in Mahalo since users are allowed to submit suggested links that they believe make a better match to their search terms. The more votes the link receives, the more it’s possible for it to be chosen as one of the Top 7 links.

The maker of Mahalo isn’t reportedly threatened by the big players in the market because ‘they’re standing on the shoulders of giants’. Each new tool or technique created and implemented by Google works to their advantage rather than the other way around.

Some website owners express dismay and apprehension about having their content appraised by humans instead of traditional search engine spiders. Experts have pointed out that human generated search results will definitely take much longer than a machine-generated one would. Many people have voiced other criticisms and doubts over Mahalo’s success. Nevertheless, Calcanis informed the public that he was able to accumulate enough funding for his site to last up to five years without profit.

What Internet Marketers Can Learn from Using Mahalo

As search results are also somewhat dependent on user suggestions, having your client’s website handpicked as one of the Top 7 can certainly be considered as something you’ve done right for your client.

Spamming will not work with Mahalo. In fact, this is one of the reasons that Jason Calcanis had touted for making Mahalo more impressive than Google or Yahoo. Machines can be fooled more easily than humans because website owners have already mastered SEO tricks and techniques that could get around search engine spiders.

Internet marketers will also learn how their client websites are rated by Mahalo and consequently, the rest of the world. Mahalo presently uses three kinds of symbols for rating websites. A warning icon means a website may contain relevant content but also irrelevant heavy ads, account registration, and other annoying aspects that prevent you from having a good time using the Internet. A website marked as Guide’s Choice is a link that the guide (who will be named) truly likes (the reason will also be briefly stated). And lastly, there’s the What Is icon which refers to websites that aren’t presently familiar to the guides but a brief description will still be provided.