Dude, Where’s the Mahalo Toolbar?
I’m living under a rock large boulder or continental plate that shields me from anything newsworthy. It’s called parenthood. And sadly, I missed the much anticipated launch of Mahalo.
I’ll condense the story. Jason Calacanis, the same person who declared that SEO was bullshit, and later proven wrong, was given venture capital funding to start a search engine to compete with Google. He called it Mahalo. It features a crapload of Google AdSense.
Someone stop me if you’re smelling something called irony. Or bullshit.
What’s better? Jason Calacanis is actively looking for feedback on this ALPHA release of Mahalo. In case you can’t tell on his post, the use of the word ALPHA 32 consecutive times should really give you an indication of what you’re in for. More bullshit.
I picked up this initially when getting caught up on Gerhart’s blog. (See post: Mahalo Search Engine Launches. And Everyone Laughs.) Andrew linked over to one of the best commentary pieces I’ve read in a long time. He also introduced me to Brian’s blog, which features an award worth post on Mahalo called “Mahalo: That’s Hawaiian for 8 Visitors A Month“. Here’s the paragraph that inspired me to blog more often:
I mean, how awesome is it that dude who has no idea how adversarial information retrieval works gets a boatload of money from a VC to go create a search engine? A human-edited search engine. Yah, let’s take the silly little task of organizing all the world’s information and underpay some people to do that. That can’t possibly need a scalable solution! This is about as smart as giving Rush Limbaugh a pharmacy.
Instantly a classic. Props to Brian on this.
Anyways, I had to share that. I’m off to go continue selling snake oil. Anyone want to take bets on how quickly Mahalo gets nulpt?
More Mahalo Links
• Mahalo: Old Is New Again, But Bad Is Still Bad
• Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search
• Mahalo: A human-powered search directory
• Lime, Rice, and Matt Cutts: Introducing Mahalo
• Mahalo Launches a Well-funded Human Powered Search
• Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
…and with that, Aloha, means goodbye.
One thought on “Dude, Where’s the Mahalo Toolbar?”
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it is ALPHA and ye it is never going to be as comprehensive as machine search.
However, we are paying people well to make our search results and I think our SeRPs are really good. Take a moment to put our version of Paris Hotels, iPhone, Flatpanel TV, and Pizza next to the versions by google, yahoo, ask, and MSN. It’s clear we a) have no spam, b) are more organized, and c) have better links in less space.
The goal is not to do everything… the goal is to do the top 10-25k search terms with humans using machines and partner with google for the rest.
Keep the feedback coming!
Jason