Mahalo: That’s Hawaiian for 8 Visitors A Month
If you’ve never heard 10,000 people laugh at the same time, my guess is you could have scratched it off your List of Stuff To Do around 3pm Pacific today if you were at the Googleplex. Why? Because my main man, JC, unleashed the least-anticipated search engine in history, Mahalo. I have been wanting to beat the shit out of this thing since I first heard it was coming.
For me, this is the first time I’ve said to myself, “Self, we are in a bubble.”
I mean, how awesome is it that dude who has no idea how adversarial information retrieval works gets a boatload of money from a VC to go create a search engine? A human-edited search engine. Yah, let’s take the silly little task of organizing all the world’s information and underpay some people to do that. That can’t possibly need a scalable solution! This is about as smart as giving Rush Limbaugh a pharmacy.
Anyways, I had to see how all this magic was going to work. I typed in [voip].
“Oops! We haven’t hand-written a result page for “voip” yet. Why?”
Because it’s a shitty, unscalable solution, that’s why. The good news, however, is that Adwords Inventory is conveniently available. So, Mahalo was created to serve better, human-edited search results than Google, but they cannot serve a single result for one of the hottest technology topics and they serve up Google’s cash cow in the absence of their own work. Genius. That’s like me paying Andy Hagans to blog.
Let’s try something outside of the “10,000 most popular topics” like [las vegas real estate]. Sweet! Not only do I NOT get information about Las Vegas real estate, I get a metric shitload of information about everything else in Vegas BUT THE ONE THING I WAS EFF’ING SEARCHING FOR. Oh, and some Adwords Inventory.
So, to recap. It won’t send traffic. It WILL give you an abundance of information on stuff you’re NOT looking for. It directly funds their biggest competitor. And it’s exactly what you’d get if Wikipedia dressed up like Kobe Bryant and went to the Colorado resort that Netscape worked at.
If High Times had a website of the month, this would win for May.
Nice review… I couldn’t have said it better.
Are you kidding me? This article is 500% gold. I can only feebly guess how you managed to be so en fuego on a Wed night.
Schwag-ass effort from none other than the charlatan douchebag, himself!
That’s an insult to High Times
It looks like the goal is to be an MFA website designed to monetize the Long-Tail of empty internal search results.
Search engine or directory? Nice to see he has went for SEO friendly urls and an internal linking architecture - that clearly deviates from being a search engine, and is obviously done to get traffic from google.
At the end of the day nobody in their right mind would use that as an alternative to anything. But, at least all the link love he got today will give him a head start in populating the real serps.
Nice write-up, here is mine:
http://www.centernetworks.com/mahalo-launches-my-critical-review
I go a bit more in detail into the issues I found.
And why this is completely a “game the se’s” which Jason said was dead.
You just gave Mahalo a link.
Am I the only one who noticed that the graphical rendering of “Mahalo” eerily resembles the graphical rendering of “Smile”…the Brian Wilson album?
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&tab=wi&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-37%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=brian%20wilson%20smile
At least Jason has good taste in music…
Best post title I’ve seen in a while and also the first search related link I’ve ever seen for high times. Way to raise the bar
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Thanks a lot for taking a look at the site and for your comments. You’re totally right about VoIP being an important topic, so we went ahead and added a page today (http://www.mahalo.com/Voip), as per your suggestion. We know we have a long way to go, and any and all feedback is hugely appreciated!
Hey man, Bill Maher called, he wants his comedy writers back. Very funny stuff. This will either flop like OJ trying to get his own reality TV show, or a year from now we will all be treating Calacanis and friends like geniuses. After all, people laughed at Galileo…
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it is ALPHA and yes it is never going to be as comprehensive as machine search.
However,I’m fairly confident we will get more than 8 visitors a month since we have 40 folks working at the company.
Seriously, our SeRPs are really good. Take a moment to put our version of Paris Hotels, iPhone, Flatpanel TV, and Pizza next to the versions by google, yahoo, ask, and MSN. It’s clear we a) have no spam, b) are more organized, and c) have better links in less space.
I would really be interested in hearing your thoughts after doing that.
Also, this is just the first week of a five year projects. We’re going to listen to the public, take suggested links, and debate the SERPs on the message boards associated with each SERP. This will take our SERPS from 60-70% complete to 90-100% complete over the next two years I believe.
already folks are sending in quality links for the twitter and apple serps.
Of course the goal is not to do everything… the goal is to do the top 10-25k search terms with humans using machines and we have partnered with google for the rest.
Keep the feedback coming!
Jason
JC & Lon, thanks for stopping by. Nobody will ever accuse a Calacanis venture of bad public relations!
All jokes aside, I guess I just expected something more revolutionary than evolutionary based upon all the leaks, the financing, advisors, etc. You’ll notice I didn’t say this won’t make money. I think it’ll make About.com jack if promoted correctly.
I know how hard it is to do the venture backed startup gig, so good luck and I hope to spam you..err, run into y’all around the neighborhood.
Brian: HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
Seriously, we are just getting started. This is like 5% of the plan.. give us some time and you’ll see we’ve got some more ideas to layer on top of this very simple one.
Look forward to your QUALITY submissions (aka spam) at Mahalo.
j
So, as I understand what is being said, is that Mahalo will have hand-tweaked search results for 10k-25k keywords within a few (years)? That’s a pretty ambitious plan.
I’m just surprised that those 10k top search terms haven’t been already pre-populated with content.
Ambitious is an understatement. Let’s start with the fact that the top 10-25k keywords change on a daily basis…
“It’s clear we a) have no spam”
I see Adsense all over this bitch. Maybe you can claim there’s no crap on your “60-70%” pages, but if I were Jack Knownothing, Mahalo is MFA on any non-mainstream term.
“we have partnered with google for the rest.”
Call it what you will! I would have said “our site is terrible for the rest”
“I have been wanting to beat the shit out of this thing since I first heard it was coming.”
Ahhhhh, this is why I read your blog.
Corey: We have adsense on some pages already. Take a look at the corvette SERP and you’ll see AdSense.
At the end of the day “curated search” is going to help a lot of people for common searches like hotels, mortgages, flatpanel TVs, cars, health issues, travel, products, etc. I can’t help it if the terms that are most in need of a curator are the ones that are the most profitable.
Seriously, we’ve raised enough money to build the company out, listen to the users, and really make a positive impact. Will it work? Who knows… it’s gonna take a ton of work and it is VERY high risk. However, no risk, no reward.
best j
Jason - You may find a market for this somewhere, but you’re always gonna be playing catch-up in the search realm. Stop calling it a “search engine” or you’re going to be competing with some of the largest companies in tech, and they will beat you.
nice review. astute, we’ll written and funny.
How long until someone offers an editor 10x what he makes to throw in a few mortgage links?
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Gee, what a suprise. And I thought for sure that Jason with the super huge brain of his was gonna make something that was superior to Google. Seriously just ask him. And he was gonna make it spam free. And make it the best thing ever in the history of the world. And everyone was gonna drop what they were doing to check it out. And once they did, they were gonna stop using Google for sure and only use Mahalo cause it is such a great resource for information. And then….
Yeah right. Great business plan. I think the real business plan is, if ya can’t beat the spammers, join em so you can make some money too.