Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
Mahalo FAQ
Wonderful idea! Unfortunate, but at least it is a noble concept.
What sites will I find / not find on Mahalo?
We will not link to:
1… spam sites.
2… non-spam sites that have deceptive, or overbearing, advertising. For example, we will not link to blogs that have nothing but ads above the fold, forcing you to scroll down to get to the content. This includes sites that are largely advertorial.
3… any sites that give the appearance of participating in phishing or any other type of malicious activity (“phishing” being the fraudulent acquisition of sensitive personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity).
4… sites that simply regurgitate information from other sites with or without giving credit where credit is due. For example, if you have a blog that you use to simply aggregate your favorite posts about gadgets from other, more notable gadget blogs (such as Engadget or Gizmodo)—without adding substantial value and information via your blog—then we will always link directly to the source of the information rather than to your blog.
5… sites which scrape or re-purpose other people’s content without permission. Note: We are not able to police every site we link to, so we will make mistakes. If we’re linking to a site which you feel is misappropriating your content please let us know by clicking the “Report” link on the search result page in question.
6… sites of unknown origin (i.e. we cannot establish who operates the site).
7… sites which have adult content or hate speech.We will link to:
1… sites that are considered authorities in their field (i.e. Edmunds for autos, Engadget for consumer electronics, and the New York Times for news).
2… sites which create original, high-quality content on a consistent basis.
3… sites that have been operating for over one year. Sites under a year will be considered, but most will be placed in a “member-submitted” section at the bottom of the page until they hit the one-year mark.
4… sites that have clean layout, design, and a modest amount of advertising.
Mahalo.com is a project of John Calacanis and more than anything, he is looking for feedback in the “alpha” release.
Unfortunately, they still have some kinks to work out, (see below for the query SEO), and even though I have become a member (signup is open), the functionality is not there to actually give them any feedback yet. As you will also see, from the picture below, that there is little relevance to SEO from Limes and Rice!
Aside from being a staunch opponent of marketing on the web, mainly SEO, John has some unbelievable concerns to contend with as far as I can see.
Here are my thoughts on Mahalo:
1. It doesn’t appear to be a search engine if it only indexes a limited number of items on the Internet.
2. If it is such a great product, why would it return Google results under their handwritten and related results, and of course the AdSense ads at the bottom of the page?
3. This is not a search engine, it is called a directory with search capabilities. Algorithms rank and return results from engines, people tag and mark items to return results when directed.
4. Why would John, being an opponent of SEO on the basis that it is an attempt for a human to inflate rankings in organic results, want to cut out the middle man and allow an editor to bias a website directly?
5. How can a project of this size succeed? (Wikipedia is not a rousing success in my mind)
There still is a lot to be discovered and uncovered from Mahalo, however, it appears to be more of a disappointment than a potential when it comes to information online.
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