Mahalo could change the way you search

I like Mahalo and I think they’re going to change the way a lot of people search the web. You can check out Scoble’s interview with Jason Calacanis (Mahalo’s founder), here. Mahalo’s a human powered search engine that pays people to write good search results. They don’t have results for everything, but that doesn’t matter because the results they do have are so much better than the competition, and if they don’t have results, they just serve you Google’s. In this way, Mahalo is a search aggregator. It’s a brilliant approach that removes any excuse for not using Mahalo as your main search engine. Their integration of outside search sites is handled well, and their design is friendly. In short, I’m a believer.

The main reason for their success will be their editorial process, precisely because it’s so good at yielding spam-free results. They pay anyone between $3 and $20 to write a good search result. Then, the results are all vetted by a team of mentors who have written at least 100 search pages. Finally, the mentors’ results are spot checked by Mahalo employees. The end result is that their search page results are instantly useful and free of spam and other forms of seo-tainted results. The pages themselves remind you of Wikipedia, except better, with more video and pictures. They focus heavily on short summaries and organizing links to the best info on the subject.

In response to the question of how Mahalo is different than Google and Yahoo, Jason says “if they’re indexing the world’s information, we’re curating the world’s best information.” He also says his audience isn’t geeks, its your Grandma. Jason relates a story about how they did a bunch of user testing and told people this was Google 2.0 and asked for their opinion. Apparently, average people just loved it, said it was a huge upgrade. That’s why I think Mahalo is on to something big.

I just hope their business model is sustainable. If it is, I think there are a lot of people out there who are willing to write great search results. As soon as they figure out what they can pay and still make money, Mahalo will be able to scale up fast. Heck, they may even make enough money from just sending long-tail searches to their partner search engines. Like I said, their aggregated search interface is a simple but very interesting approach. Jason, I hope you’ll share the numbers on all of this someday.