How many search results has Mahalo.com created to date?
We’ve done the top 4,000 SeRPs—short for “search engine result pages”—so far.

What happens if Mahalo.com doesn’t have a result created for a search?
If Mahalo.com doesn’t have a result created for a search term yet, it gives the user Google’s excellent results, as well as the ability to receive an alert when Mahalo has completed the result. (see screen shot #8 below)

Are humans better than machines at creating search results?
Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our “Guides” use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.

How much time do you spend building a SeRP?
It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.

What’s the business model? I don’t see any advertising on the site right now.
We’re going to start testing various advertising units on the site over the next couple of months. For now we’re gonna focus on building out a large number of high-quality results. When we don’t have a result we show Google’s results and share advertising revenue with them. You can do a search for Corvette to see an example of Google Adsense on one of our pages.

Why are you doing this?
After leaving AOL, I felt like I wanted to do another project that fit two criteria: 1. something that helped people a lot and 2. something that everyone could use every day. Search seemed like a place where my editorial experience in magazines, blogs, and social news could really help.

What’s the mission of Mahalo?
To help people—a lot.

Can you expand on that?
We want to help people find what they’re looking for and discover cool things they weren’t looking for. We want to create the best search results available on the web for the most common search terms. Now, we know we can’t hand write all of the search terms in the world, but we can do the most common ones and that will help people… a lot!

How is this different than Wikipedia?
Wikipedia produces encyclopedia pages as a goal, we produce guides to a term. Wikipedia is the destination and as such they produce the content. We’re not the destination, we don’t produce the content, but rather we look at all the content that’s out there and we organize it and help people organize and find it.

How is this different than DMOZ or the original Yahoo directory?
Those sites use a top-down directory format for their information, we use a search metaphor. Now, we do have a categorization system so you can surf our information like you would DMOZ, but we think most folks want to type one word into a box and get a big payoff—Google’s trained people to expect that. Also, the DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory have not been maintained over the past decade, so their results are hit and miss. We only include the *best* links on our pages—nothing borderline. So, I think our results are much higher quality.

How is this different than About.com?
About.com, like the Wikipedia, is a destination, not a guide to the web. They are tapping citizens to write content about what they’re passionate about–we’re trying to index all the passionate information on the web. So, again, we’re not trying to compete with blogs, wikis, newspapers, website, or communities on the web… we’re trying to curate those sites.

Is this a Google killer?
Nothing is going to “kill” Google in my estimation. Google has an amazing search product and the world’s most efficient advertising infrastructure. We plan on partnering with Google for these services just like I did at Weblogs, Inc., AOL, and Netscape. That being said, head-to-head Mahalo’s human-powered search results will be much better than Google’s machine-created results—when we do have a result. My feeling is that ultimately people will use Mahalo for popular search terms, and machine-based search engines like Google and Yahoo for long-tail searches.

How do you plan on getting people to pay attention to Mahalo? Are you going to do a big marketing push?
The best products on the Internet rise to the top by word of mouth. Our plan is to focus all our energy on making the best possible product and let the public do the marketing for us.

Screenshots:
1. Mahalo Home Page
2. Mahalo search result page for Paris Hotels
3. Mahalo search result page for iPhone
4. Mahalo search result page for Apple
5. Mahalo search result page for Mini Cooper
6. Mahalo search result page for George W. Bush
7. Detailed shot of our search result page for Apple’s iPhone, highlighting 20 things you should know about Mahalo
8. Mahalo “no human results” page. When Mahalo doesn’t have a direct hit we show related searches and Google’s excellent machine-powered results. So, there is no downside to switching to Mahalo if you’re a Google user.
9. Comparison of Mahalo’s search result for Paris Hotels and Google’s search result for Paris Hotels
10. Mahalo’s message board for Paris Hotels

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 2:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.