Mahalo for Edited Search
August 17th, 2007
In a world where “Google” has become an accepted and overused verb, a new human-powered search engine called Mahalo is daring to rear its upstart head. What’s different about human search? The results that humans assemble are organized, logical and spam free. Most of Mahalo experiences on have also had en element of discovery – a suggested related gem of a link that shows up in the top 7 links, not the first 7 pages.
Mahalo, which means “Thank you” in Hawaiian, sports the tagline “We’re here to help”. Mahalo uses a team of full time editors to assemble their results, but the team also invites anyone to contribute relevant search results pages and be paid $10 - $15 a piece through their Greenhouse program. This isn’t just an interesting model for community/user engagement, its also a very efficient strategy to be able to quickly scale the number of searches that yield distilled results.
Is Mahalo going to be able to replace all your current search needs? Not right now, but there are times when a well-edited list of results is preferable. For example, have you heard of the internet sensation surrounding “Chocolate Rain”? A search on Google yields a whopping 2.7Million results for this term. The Mahalo page results page provides their top 7 links, the video itself, and this note from a human guide:
“The Chocolate Rain Meme is centered around a music video sung by a deep voiced 25 year old man named Tay Zonday. Originally posted on YouTube, the video has spawned many spin-off parody videos.”
This is pretty much all the time this particular item deserves and 2 minutes after looking for it on Mahalo, you can wander off into the Interweb with all you need to know about this piece of pop culture. Have no fear though, human search is not just for saving time - just check out their home page or changing list of Top 10 searches pages and you’ll see plenty of fun distraction and topics you didn’t realize you were dying to read about. Mahalo for that…
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