Search Engine Mahalo Launches Social Features
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 12, 2007 | Share This
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Human-powered search engine Mahalo, which relies on user-submitted links and human editors for its search results, has just launched Mahalo Social. Registered users can now fill out profiles and add/invite friends. Mahalo has also added a new ranking system taking into account the quality of links users submit, which should help keep users honest and minimize spam. Interestingly, Mahalo Social also lets users add links for their profiles on other social networks, including Twitter and StumbleUpon, which means it’s potentially helpful to personal-brand search engine optimization (a la Matt Creamer).
The search engine is still relatively new - it launched in May of this year - but TechCrunch notes Mahalo’s growth is promising:
Mahalo is doing very well based on early Comscore statistics, which report 2 million monthly page views and 874,000 unique visitors. More importantly, the trend is clearly towards fast growth. Compete statistics agree.
Search Engine Land notes that Mahalo is one of the first engines taking a step toward what they call Search 4.0 - adding a “social layer to their search results” - but also writes they see themselves more as a content site than a search engine:
Jason acknowledges that Mahalo is a content site rather than a search engine. 30% of the site is editorial generated by their staff, but it’s presented in a search context. Mahalo contains about 26,000 pages so far and Jason says they’ll never cover the long tail of search. But he does think they’ll catch up with the amount of content on Wikipedia, and within five years should be covering up to half of what people are searching for… they’re now handing Tom Sawyer-like paint brushes out to the rest of us and looking to crowdsourcing to help paint the search results fence. Harnessing the wisdom (or lack thereof, as the case may be) of crowds helps them overcome what they feel is currently their greatest hurdle: adding and updating pages.
Though we predicted it would be difficult for Mahalo to build a loyal user base, their social features may help prove us wrong. Mahalo is definitely ahead of algorithm-based engines like Google and Yahoo in implementing meaningful social features; even though both Google and Yahoo have much larger user bases, neither has rolled out anything like this.
Topics: Search: Innovations, Social Media |