Sunday 3 June 2007

Mahalo - A human search engine



One more search engine has been added to scan the web. A "human powered" search engine Mahalo has been launched recently. Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis launched the alpha version of Mahalo. The ultimate goal is to provide the search results close to human relevance. Mahalo in Hawaiian means "Thank you". Currently, about 40 Mahalo employees track the best results of the web's most repeated and searched terms. Calacanis claimed the results would be 10 times better than google and yahoo.


When a user searches for a term, the Top 7 links would be at the top of the search result. It is followed by the top news related to the search term. The related articles and background information is added. Photos and videos of the search term takes the next place and then the reviews and the information on message boards and blogs. Related searches are added. You can look at the results by searching for Microsoft Surface


One thing to note at the end of the search result is the human that had written the search result. Clicking on the link, brings up the information about the person and the future search terms he is going to write. We can recommend the links to Mahalo. In future, the search engine might become ad-supported and would see the ads on search results similar to google. It also has a list of the Today's Top 20 searches and know what people are currently thinking of.