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Mahalo.com
I am going to start this post with a disclosure. We've known Jason Calacanis since 1995 and have been through a lot with him. The Gotham Gal was his partner in his first venture, Silicon Alley Reporter, in the late 90s. We, The Gotham Gal and me, are personal investors in Mahalo and have been since the start of the company.
So what is Mahalo? It's a search engine, just like Google, except that the search engine result pages (serps) are built by humans not machines. This has been done before, in fact many times before (Magellan, Look Smart, etc, etc). It's never been particularly successful. But Jason's got a model to build serps really cheaply and in my experience with Jason over the years, I've come to realize that you can never ever count him out. He's scrappy, tenacious, and usually successful.
Here a a few result pages. You'll see immediately how and why it's different than Google.
Search for iPhone
Search for Barack Obama
And of course, the obligatory search for your own name
You can see that the result pages look a bit more like wikipedia than they do Google. When Jason first described the idea to me, he said he was going to combine wikipedia, weblogs inc, and google. I think he's done a pretty good job of executing on that basic concept.
Time will tell how popular Mahalo becomes. I think the result pages are a lot better than Google, but they only have about 5,000 result pages right now. If you search for a term that they don't have done yet, you'll get something that looks like this with google links below it.
I am frankly shocked that they didn't do the shake shack in the first 5,000 terms. It would have been in my top ten!
And the name, well I am not going to say much about that other than I can never remember how to spell it but hopefully I am in the minority on that.
I am rooting for Jason on multiple levels. First, he's a friend of ours. Second, we are investors. And third, I think there has not been much innovation in search in a long time. Google's dominance of the category has made it an area many of the best entrepreneurs avoid. Thankfully Jason's the kind of person who is always looking for a challenge and he's certainly found one in Mahalo.
Comments (25) | Posted May 31, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Did they finally let you have a wikipedia page? Cool.
I'm not sure how this scales although if anyone can scale it for a reasonable price, it's Jason.
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | May 31, 2007 8:15:35 AM
I'm surprised that the search engine didn't cover "diabetes" or, the, literally, #1 search term, "sex". If you don't cover "sex", you're not covering the "top" terms in search.
I think Jason will ultimately succeed but not before there is a name change to the search engine.
Shouldn't there be collaborate voting tools that enable the masses to decide which results are top-3? My old CEO at Choice Media suggested this years-ago...
Noah
Posted by: Noah Robinson | May 31, 2007 8:29:31 AM
Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle?
As someone who defends the notion of centralized editorial, I am very excited about this concept. But I am not clear how this evolves from "listings service" to "search engine" (Fred, you tantalizingly suggest they have some new cheap methodology but then don't elaborate.)
At one point Yahoo had, what, six or eight thousand people frantically indexing before they caved in to the seeming inevitable and more or less mothballed indexing and went to search algorithms (giving google its start and ultimately acquiring Goto/Overture).
Posted by: Steven Kane | May 31, 2007 10:13:23 AM
At one point a few years back, Google would use DMOZ to (I think?) pickup new sites for their index and also site descriptions. DMOZ had a human decision based inclusion process and ended up I think being fairly well ranked in Google along with a gateway to the index. Thus back when referral 'googlejuice' and off page factors/in bound links were a big deal for a site to have to start the inclusions process in the index the value of placement on DMOZ began to move toward a premium. I am sure many of the 'area experts' on DMOZ were good/honest about being gatekeepers, but there was also a scrupulous side to it that was what I would call the DMOZ underworld to get sites included that should not necessarily be there. I think that the balance of cheap labor (to create terms/viewports) vs. mahalo editors who could be bought for links would be a HUGE factor in mahalos success. If there is anyone who would realize the ability for paid links inclusion it would probably be Calacanis after seeing the social link media sites/site submitter selling problems of the past few years, netscapes/digg etc. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
of course, creating that premium branding has a value to it also ;)
Posted by: cyanbane | May 31, 2007 10:24:33 AM
Fred -
Firstly, it's actually NOT a search engine just like google. It's a search interface that pulls edited results out of a directory / Database it then does a back fill of results from Google, so lets be clear on our definitions please.(This is not a search engine )
Secondly as you point out this has been done a ton of times before, so when you talk about innovation, come on.. there really ain much of that going on here.. it's a rehash of the same, with a bit more emphasis on networking / messaging.
Thirdly, let's be straight. You are FIRSTLY rooting for this coz u r an investor. Not out of love for yer mate... come on !!!
(reading that I was like, gimme a break for lords sake, what do u take us for)
And fourthly - why, pray tell. Do you refer to your wife as a Gotham Gal ??
Shakes. Innit?
Posted by: John Innit | May 31, 2007 10:33:18 AM
I was going through my morning RSS feed read, and I came across this post on Mahalo, and the very next feed in my reader was this post on Maholo, over at alarm:clock:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/05/im_a_mahalo_edi.html
Not as optimistic as yours, I'm afraid... but I thought you'd want to know.
Posted by: Silus Grok | May 31, 2007 10:38:45 AM
Fred, it's spelled like it sounds, and vice versa.
Innit, You don't know Fred very well , do you?
Could it be that there is one VC in the world who values personal relationships over the almighty dollar? Just because you are a lousy greed head does not make everybody one.
He calls her the Gotham Gal because she IS the Gotham Gal - jeez! Where do these people come from? Cluelessville?
Posted by: jackson | May 31, 2007 11:11:47 AM
what is it with all this gotham gal stuff?
isn't that just a bit high school?
Jackson, I don't think any VC will value personal relationships over the dollar if they cross the line by investing in a friends company. Business my friend is business and don't for a second think otherwise.
Posted by: Rickson Malley | May 31, 2007 11:33:29 AM
Ever since I've started reading about Mahalo and hearing about their approach, something has rung familiar. Sure, Magellan comes to mind, but something more recent than that. And then it struck me. As I started thinking about the "made for Google" sites and domainers out there that build pages about a topic through some times nefarious means (ie. splogs), it started approaching what I feel Mahalo is doing, albeit in a more upfront and professional way.
Richard Rosenblatt of Intermix fame moved into the domainer space (FYI, domainers are people who buy and sell domain names in volume based on popular misspellings or on generic terms people tend to type for the purpose of getting traffic and monetizing w/ads) some time ago. But he subsequently announced that he would be building up these properties with useful content on the various topics associated w/his domains. It seems like Mahalo is in effect doing something similar. But on top of this they're enabling people to directly search through their stable of content.
This certainly a novel idea, but I don't know that this is any more a search engine than providing a search box on a site to unearth its pages. Especially that if Mahalo has not created a page it simply returns regular Google search results. As always with such matters, the key is in the revenue model, and I suspect that Mahalo is expecting traffic from its SEO activities, but I guess the term "search engine" for a site that will have created 20K landing pages on pop subjects seems like a stretch ;) Would you call About.com a "search engine"? Hmmm...
Posted by: P-Air | May 31, 2007 11:42:07 AM
Per Nick's comment above, here are top 20 (out of 200) search terms per Wordtracker:
1 6875 porn
2 5606 myspace
3 5363 google
4 4959 pussy
5 4177 hentai
6 3937 boobs
7 3894 yahoo
8 3560 myspace.com
9 3535 ebay
10 2929 milf
11 2850 games play
12 2764 akon
13 2579 paris hilton
14 2437 mapquest
15 2398 free porn
16 2391 linkin park
17 2357 89.com
18 2355 yahoo.com
19 2332 tits
20 2280 game cheats for ps2
Mahalo had something for 9 out of these top 20, and in going down a bit further, it does well on non-porn/sex related terms.
Posted by: P-Air | May 31, 2007 11:55:17 AM
I think the idea here is to give a content like experience which is better than vanilla search for selected topics. Wikipedia does this for head queries and so does answers.com and about.com. One interesting startup in this space is kosmix.com that tries to algorithmically generate content pages. For some of their verticals (like health), they are able to give a much better experience over vanilla search results.
Posted by: Will | May 31, 2007 1:38:53 PM
People. Stop picking on Fred for referring to his wife as gotham gal. That is her blog name. So it is perfecttly reasonable to use her blog identity on his blog.
Posted by: Dasher | May 31, 2007 1:55:33 PM
Maybe now that they've indexed important Venture Capitalists like Fred Wilson, they can move on to the minor lights (like Abe Lincoln, who doesn't have a page).
Posted by: MARK KLEIN MD | May 31, 2007 2:14:29 PM
Yeah, what he said!
Greed and envy are closely related, your slip is showing Innit.
Posted by: jackson | May 31, 2007 2:17:22 PM
Mahala and mybloglog should get together, because first take is that mahalo's people results rock (and mybloglogs....well...don't)
Innit--in the eyes of the user, it's a search engine...so that's what I'd call it too, regardless of what systems are driving the results.
Posted by: Andy Swan | May 31, 2007 2:23:19 PM
Yeah maybe the results for any given terms right now are better than what Google or any other search engine has to offer, but how do they plan to keep the data updated?
A new site might become a super relevant place for a search query within days or weeks, how will Maholo pick it up?
Google can, using their algo which updates search results almost on a daily basis right now...and looking at search data they collect. There is no way Mahalo will offer more accurate results than Google 6 mths from now.
Posted by: Bobosse | May 31, 2007 5:44:29 PM
Bobosse is right. We should all just give up and get the Google chip implanted in brain now.
Posted by: Andy Swan | May 31, 2007 6:01:50 PM
Posted by: curmudgeonly troll | May 31, 2007 6:44:08 PM
Why does it seem that there's a trend of doing personal vs USV deals?
Posted by: rick | May 31, 2007 11:03:11 PM
"Cluelessville"...far reaching obscurity. Nice work! ;)
So I'm missing the boat on Mahalo. What is the benefit here that is worth reformatting my search patterns? Why should we search on this site and not our normal site (other than being a fan...er...reader of JC OR FW? I know this is an alpha, but if someone could just spell out why this is going to trump other searches...even in just one aspect so that I can correlate the situational usage it would help me out.
My understanding is that human chosen results will yield easier searches...? Is this for an internet simpleton (I mean no offense) who can't sift through results? Answers?
I'll end by saying...uh...Mahalo.
Posted by: Robert John Ed | Jun 1, 2007 9:17:50 AM
BTW, Mahalo does mean a ticker/pendulum/fly in Bulgarian.
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | Jun 1, 2007 10:59:08 AM
Why will Mahalo succeed? Human brains are still the most advanced and sophisticated machines on this planet. The most powerful supercomputers (Google) are as smart as insects. Most people don't have a clue how stupid computers are. Why should we expect some insects to think instead of us?
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | Jun 1, 2007 2:08:09 PM
P.Air: We are not doing adult terms at Mahalo because we figure we're not going to add much value you there, AND because we think we might be more valuable to parents as a *safer* place for their kids to start their surfing.
Give us time and you'll see we have everything of note on Word Tracker. We're working in verticals right now so we can get the format nice and tight.
best jason
Posted by: Jason | Jun 3, 2007 5:26:59 PM
i thought about this a lot before posting fred bc i respect your judgment a lot and thght perhaps i missing something but frankly i just dont get it. pretty much everything i ever need to find i find quickly on google and the box is right there on my home page and email so it couldnt be simpler... plus, the site is adding labor costs through the human intermediation which slims margins and hampers the capacity to scale....
Posted by: Phil | Jun 7, 2007 4:22:30 PM
Do you have any thoughts on this TechCrunch posting (and the subsequent comments):
Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/calacanis-fires-people-who-have-a-life/
Posted by: aagha | Mar 7, 2008 5:57:38 PM
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