Today 'human-powered' search engine Mahalo is launching a new Firefox toolbar, which has some unique functionality that could potentially convert users from Google Search, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and other major search engines. The new toolbar, once installed into Firefox (IE version is due in September), displays a sidebar every time you do a search on a popular query in Google and other major search engines. For example if I do a search on "digital camera" in Google, a sidebar will pop up with Mahalo results. Note that the sidebar only displays if Mahalo has a match for the search query - e.g. if I search for "richard macmanus" I get no sidebar.
Mahalo is also releasing a "synchronous search" feature called Mahalo Follow - which reads the keywords on the page. For example a search on "digital camera" displays these keywords: cameras, digital, models, new, camera, resolution, megapixels, small, zoom, electronics, ratings, take, health, our, few, range, buying, image, lens, slrs. Essentially the algorithm reads the density of page, giving headlines more weight etc - and Mahalo says it is constantly tweaking the algorithm to learn.
I spoke to Jason Calacanis, Mahalo CEO, yesterday to find out more about Mahalo's goals. He made no bones about the fact they're gunning for Google, Yahoo and the other major search players. Jason's goal is that people will become so impressed by Mahalo results compared to the major search engines, that they will convert to Mahalo as their search engine of choice. What's more, when you download the toolbar you are prompted to add Mahalo as a search engine in your Firefox toolbar.
Mahalo sidebar displays when I do a search in Google
So what is Mahalo? Basically it is a human-edited search engine that focuses only on popular search queries. Right now Mahalo has 8,800 pages, on what Jason calls "Fat Tail" search queries. It is a play on words of 'Long Tail', a theory which when applied to search engines means the millions of search queries that individually get little action - but combined they get millions of hits. While Google and the other major search engines focus on providing results for The Long Tail of search queries, Mahalo has decided that the "Fat Tail" (i.e. only the most popular queries) is where they'll make money.
But The fat Tail is also the most competitive search area, for search engines as well as the hundreds of thousands of content creators who want to rank on the first page in Google for popular search queries. That has led to a huge amount of 'content spam' in Google and other major search engines. Indeed black hat tactics abound in the world of search and content creation, so Mahalo aims to provide quality search results that weed out the garbage and help people find useful content.
While Mahalo has only 8,800 search results pages now, 25,000 is their next aim - perhaps by the end of the year. Jason said they are growing at 650 search results per week. This is about double what they originally thought, because the Mahalo Greenhouse - a community of paid Mahalo search result writers - has exploded with activity according to Jason. There are over 800 people who are members of the Greenhouse and this is growing by a half-dozen a day.
Mahalo employs 40 people in editorial, but they're now all focused on quality review of public submissions (via Greenhouse). Over the last few days they've accepted close to 100 search result submissions from the public - and note these are paid contributors.
There is also a "third phase" coming up, says Jason, whereby Mahalo will enable the public to help index its search results. The first phase was Mahalo employees writing results, the second (in progress now) is the public writing results and the third is the public rating results (i.e. involved with index). This essentially means that Mahalo will categorize all their searches. And Jason was scathing in his assessment of how others have fared with categorization. He said that Dmoz (an open source directory) is now "destroyed", Yahoo doesn't focus on their directory anymore because there's too much information, and "About.com is a disaster".
Jason said that Mahalo search results will always be better than Google and the others, because they are human-edited and they only provide links to "very good or excellent sites". These are ultimately judgments by the editors, but Mahalo has criteria to judge this - e.g. it must be original content, the site has to have a good reputation, has been around for a while, etc. Jason says that they go through a "series of tests" before accepting a link.
The major search engine that Mahalo most resembles, in my opinion, is Ask.com. We've profiled Ask.com a few times before and always mention that it tries to present useful information on page one of its results. Ask.com has editors too, although their role is more to arrange content than to write the results. Jason was rather brutal in his assessment of Ask.com, however, claiming that they run "deceptive ads" and that much of their results could be considered spam (to be fair he made the same argument about Google, Yahoo and the other majors). He mentioned a search query for "paris hotels", in which he says the first 8 results in Ask.com are spam or ads.
I tried a search for "digital camera" on Ask.com and the results were good. Although Mahalo's were better, for that query. I also tried a search for "olympics" and Ask's results were much better than Mahalo's on that one.
Of course Ask.com would argue that they provide results for any search query, whereas Mahalo is very limited right now (to 8,800 results). So I'm not sure it's fair to compare the two, because one thing I look for in a search engine is results consistency - i.e. for a default search engine, I want results for everything I type in. So for that reason alone, Ask.com could reasonably argue that they're a better search engine than Mahalo.
Mahalo vs Ask with "olympics"
I asked Jason who is Mahalo's target audience? He said their target audience is the same as Google,Yahoo, etc - so they're basically mainstream people who may not be as tech savvy as the people who use del.icio.us for example.
But the big question is: how will Mahalo get uptake for their toolbar? After all, mainstream people aren't usually known to download third party toolbars from startups (they may use the Yahoo or Google toolbar, but that's about it usually). Jason replied that "word of mouth is the greatest tool possible" and that they'll be marketing it via the 800 Greenhouse members. There will be a Mahalo Follow contest, where Greenhouse users will get points and there will be monthly giveaways.
I admire what Mahalo is trying to do - I too am frustrated by the amount of spam and just downright poor results from the major search engines. I'm all for quality control when it comes to Web content. So in that respect, I would use Mahalo for certain popular queries. However I also think the major search engines are improving in regards to quality - e.g. Google Universal and personalization has to my mind improved their results. And as I mentioned above with Ask.com, to be a default search engine you need to provide much greater coverage than 8,800 results (try tacking another couple of zeros on and then we can talk about being my default SE).
Also I have to say that the Mahalo toolbar is kind of annoying from a UI perspective. Having the sidebar pop up every time I search for something (including in Gmail!) quickly got tiresome. I'll be brutally honest myself and admit that I disabled it after an hour or so. This is a problem with any system that pops up a sidebar, it has a high probability of being annoying for users.
But all in all, Mahalo's goals are admirable. I'd probably compare them more to About.com or even Wikipedia than Google at this point, but it is only Aplha and the promise is there. It's a huge ask though (pardon the pun) to scale this to be a truly mainstream search engine.
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Can you give some examples of where Google has failed you on a search? I assume there must be some, but I almost always find what I need using Google, if I don't my first choice is to adjust the query rather then to adjust the search engine.
Posted by: ted | August 10, 2007 5:10 PM
Mahalo is interesting, but it is futile. It can not beat Google with this approach. Poping this up is definitely a poor UI choice, but...
There is something to be said about simplicity and quality of Mahalo results. I checked it out a few times on specific topics and it was very good. It was simpler and more mainstream than google in terms of presentation.
Personally I have no idea why we need thousands of pages of Google results. I have never ever navigated to the second page. I rarely look at fifth choice. I do not think that average consumer needs to deal with the results in the form that they are presented. Mahalo already gets the presentation right. This is all about marketing, its not about algorithms.
The reason I don't think Mahalo can win, is because they can not out market Google. Its poker and do not have enough cash.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | August 10, 2007 5:27 PM
Ted, I agree that's half the problem - Google is usually 'good enough'. I continue to use it as my default search engine, although I give alternatives like Mahalo a try often.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | August 10, 2007 6:59 PM
Richard - gosh, this is one awesome overview post, even tho I believe Mahalo is not going to work. (this is why you are the king!)
Mahalo's how-to's have moved it away from the search engine market and I still stand by my original point that he isn't creating fat tail searches, but instead creating pages for whatever might be hot at the time just to get some buzz. Every page he creates now is sent to digg, delicious, etc. I am not sure how I feel about this frankly.
Let me give you a real-world example. I post content on CN, you post content here and within minutes Google/Technorati has it indexed. Does Mahalo do this? Nope. Does Mahalo really find the best content? I don't know. Look at their Pownce page for example. I have a video review and was one of the first reviewers, yet I am not listed. I won't even go into the bias issue as it seems to have gotten a 5% better, but it's still there. Compare Mahalo to Google Hot Trends.
Jason says he is going for the mainstream - do you think my mother knows what "Internet Zeitgeist" means? do you think she uses pownce?
The simple fact is that this is not a "live search" like Google is. It would be great for Jason to post some stats on traffic - I will be a donut and a cup of joe that most of it is coming from his blogger friend posts (like this one lol) and from his pushes on the social sites.
What Jason does very well is "funneled releases" - send out something new every 3rd week, get the bloggers to write about it for a buzz uptick, use ego marketing the other weeks and mahalo is set. This funnel is excellent and I could see Jason authoring a book about it someday.
I also believe his "community CEO" program is wrong and makes him look like a poor leader.
I say this and I still believe Jason is a smart and talented guy. Like me, he speaks his thoughts without any fluff and I appreciate that. I look forward to meeting him at TC20.
Can you imagine Jack Bauer on 24 saying to Chloe - "get John's info on Mahalo and patch it thru on the com link". :)
Posted by: Allen Stern | August 10, 2007 7:55 PM
Alan you raise some great points. The Pownce example is excellent and I see it unfortunately includes a spam blog in there - i.e. mashable. So right there my estimation of Mahalo has gone down. I thought this was about quality information?
Yes I agree this can't possibly scale as a mainstream search engine. I do think their focus on quality info is good, provided they keep black-hat blogs out of their results and include quality info likes yours Allen and R/WW.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | August 10, 2007 8:11 PM
It's worth a shot, and it's a different approach, so I definitely think it's worthwhile. I'll give it a shot, although when I'm looking for a specific piece of text, like an error message or a part number, Google and Yahoo are going to be with me for a very long time. I don't use engines to search for terms like 'shop online', I tend towards looking for a specific piece of code or an answer to a problem I'm having.
Posted by: Morgan | August 10, 2007 9:00 PM
I am not surprised to hear Mashable described as a spam site, but I am also not aware of any specific incident or proof that revealed pure spaminess. It's clear the site is only built to get pageviews, not to offer anything of real value, but is it spam?
In any case with regard to Mahalo the one chance they have is that they are getting good data on what people are looking for and what they're interested in, so they may be able to cheaply build around that. No real compelling vision or interesting idea though, just a way to get attention and ad dollars.
Posted by: Ted | August 10, 2007 11:53 PM
I'm definitely open to new search ideas. To me it seems like the major search engines aren't getting any better with junk results. And it doesn't make matters any better when they each generally return the same results. With that said, I still love Google because of its speed to at least point me in the right direction.
Posted by: HighFivez.com | August 11, 2007 10:28 AM
I don't think they are trying to beat Google at all, this toolbar is aimed at complementing Google's results .. not that I like that idea, but yea..
Posted by: Steffen | August 11, 2007 10:45 AM
"dmoz is destroyed."
DMOZ is not destroyed. DMOZ is not falling over. DMOZ is growing.
75,000 editors - 5 Million Sites - 700,000 categories.
DMOZ.org
Posted by: mozzie | August 11, 2007 11:00 AM
Mahalo says it is constantly tweaking the algorithm to learn.
Well done to Mahalo in developing their search engine, however I would encourage them to dig harder at inventing new & better search algorithms if they want to get close to where Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, et al, are at the moment. The major search engine vendors are already developing & using advanced Machine Learning algorithms (self-learning & self-adapting algorithms) both from proprietary research work plus ones developed from publicly available published algorithms.
To the developers of Mahalo, have you checked out Support Vector Machines (SVM) learning algorithm if you haven't used it already? There are many variants of SVM today, so just check out the literatures as well as some SVM open sources that are freely available. Perhaps, you could combine it (SVM) with a non-linear dimensional reduction algorithm such as perhaps, SOM (Self-Organised Map), GTP (Generative Topographic Mapping), KPCA (Kernel Principal Component Analysis), LLE (Locally Linear Embedding) , KICA (Kernel Independent Component Analysis), etc. Also these non-linear dimensional reduction algorithms listed above have many variants each, so check out the literatures to find a robust version that suits your application. First used the non-linear reduction algorithm to extract the features of the data (term-by-document, links or users history), then train the reduced dataset using SVM, so it learns the data features.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | August 11, 2007 11:03 AM
I've been using Mahalo Follow for a week or two and I really like it. Many of us readers here at ReadWriteWeb are not the target market. It's a little hard to guess with so few results pages exactly how it'll all shake out, but I find I'm getting value from it and so I continue to run Follow. I don't need to think "oh I'm going to check Mahalo for something related", it just comes up when its got something useful to provide.
I think Jason's got enough cash and drive to make it work. I imagine this time next year using Mahalo and Powerset, but I doubt a whole lot of Google. Depending on what you are looking for, one of those two will get you much closer to good results, much faster.
Posted by: Ryan Scott | August 11, 2007 11:08 AM
Interesting views...I enjoyed reading the comments. I still haven't got a final verdict on Mahalo, while I'm actually not using it for any search purpose.
I wonder though, if for search on mobile phones, where scrolling down through results becomes too tedious, Mahalo's summaries could offer an advantage?
Obviously this engine wasn't created with the thought of optimising the mobile search experience, but perhaps it's worth checking this end. I'll try it...
Posted by: Uri L. | August 11, 2007 11:21 AM
"Mahalo Follow" looks like SearchRadar by Webaroo.
http://searchradar.webaroo.com/search/
Posted by: Dheeraj Kumar | August 11, 2007 1:16 PM
Mahalo is a pretty good search engine, I tried it out for a couple of searches. However, I think I'm going to stick with my default search engine, which is Google.
Posted by: Jess | August 11, 2007 4:02 PM
Man expended much energy doing things. Man invented computer. Computer automated what man used to do manually, saving time, effort and money. Then idiot invented Mahalo to go back to doing things manually.
Posted by: Amusis | August 11, 2007 10:47 PM
Mahalo searches are being listed in my Google search history. Is everyone sure these companies have nothing to do with each other? Is this supposed to be happening or is it a theoretically impossible glitch?
BTW, I have Google desktop installed but off, and I don't have any Mahalo software. I don't see how this could happen unless they're sharing data. One page in my browswer shouldn't be able to talk to another, right? (Firefox 2.x)
Posted by: Brian O'Connell | August 12, 2007 11:04 AM
Did a little digging and it appears that the problem might be Google Analytics. In exchange for sophisticated info on their visitors, websites install a hefty chunk of Google javascript on visitor's browsers. What Google gets in return is all that visitor information. Mahalo uses Google Analytics (as does Read/Write Web BTW) and therefore Google knows all of my activity there. So that's a one way that Mahalo searches can end up in Google search history. (Although I should note I didn't register with Mahalo or provide my email address.)
Here's a post about Google Analytics.
Posted by: Brian O'Connell | August 12, 2007 11:56 AM
Alright. One more post. It's Google AdSense. Every page on Mahalo has a request for a google.com script for AdSense in which it tells google what the search term is in the query string "&q=Search Terms". Being logged into my Google account at the time, my Google cookies identifying me to Google are passed along.
Posted by: Brian O'Connell | August 12, 2007 1:06 PM
Our human-powered search site Bessed, which debuted a few months before Mahalo (but with far less VC dollars and fanfare unfortunately), is also attempting to cover searches with the help of human editors, but we have a different philosophy than Mahalo, and I'm interested to see which is correct.
I'll actually be writing a piece about this for the Alt Search Engines site, but what my question comes down to is: where is the pain in search today? Where are searchers feeling that they're getting lost in spam versus getting the info they want? Mahalo seems to think it's the short tail, while we at Bessed think it's the long tail, where manipulating rankings at Google and other engines is much easier.
Thoughts?
Posted by: Adam Jusko | August 13, 2007 8:47 AM
Brian stressed an interesting aspect. The G-Analytics is Mahalo's Achilles' ankle. Mahalo acts as a greenhouse for Google search because Google will just have to take links of each Mahalo page and tweak its algorithm to show them higher on its result page.
My second question (more a musing) is that Google sets the standards for online search. But how does Mahalo do with the G-Analytics to know their search terms are the most searched?
Posted by: Nuno Bastei | August 16, 2007 11:11 AM