Simon’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what Jason’s Calacanis’s start-up, codenamed Projext X might be about.   Well, it’s just launched, a bit earlier than planned.   What did Project X turn out to be?  Well, it’s officially called Mahalo…  here’s my take…

What is Mahalo?

Mahalo calls itself a “human-powered search engine”.    What does that really mean? Well, Mahalo is a web-site that contains the results of historical searches performed and collated by people.  They take popular search terms, and try to collate various interesting links together in appropropriate categories.

It’s actually a bit like what you might do yourself, if you were trying to use a regular search engine to research a topic you don’t know about.   So, while it’s not perfect - it should be a pretty good starting place for rapidly researching a topic.

The neat thing about this idea is that from the Mahalo point of view is that, to be useful, it doesn’t have to link you to the definitively best content on the Net.  It actually just has to link you to “pretty good” content, quickly.

Clearly, the bet here is that Mahalo will get very big, in a “Wikipedia” kind of way.   In fact, you could say that Mahalo is actually a bit like Wikipedia, but without all the content, and with a much expanded “External Links” section.

Do I think it will succeed?   It might.  I think it’s useful; I can certainly see myself using it. It will probably need some favourable placing near the top of Google search results (like Wikipedia entries have) to really hit the big-time though.

I haven’t commented on the quality of the link collections returned from searches, because it’s such early days.   Truth be told, the quality is a bit variable at the moment; but they’ve made a good start, and they appear to have raised enough cash to give themselves a  pretty long runway.

Anyway, best of luck to everyone at Mahalo - I hope it works out great!