With all the crap Jason Calacanis get in the blog sphere for being an idiot, he is actually into something with Mahalo. Growth is really starting to pick up at a steady rate (almost at an unbelievable rate). I am not declaring Mahalo a winner yet, but it’s sure proven a point.
My big problem with Mahalo is that it is basically human moderated(edited) by 20 guys that work in Mahalo. Yes, it’s user feed them with links but the final cut(as I understand it) is still up to the moderators. The claim they are spam free (which is probably true thanks to the moderators):
We take the time to find and organize the best links for search terms, so you don’t have to. With traditional search engines you need to figure out the right search term and find relevant results within an unorganized list that often contains irrelevant results, spam, and some mediocre sites. With Mahalo, you can enter a simple search term and instantly get an organized page of results that only includes great links.
Our results contain everything you need to know about a topic and are organized into sections to help you quickly find what you need. For example, our travel pages for cities contain sections on basics (weather, current events, maps, history), flights, vacation packages, transportation, activities, attractions, events, tours, hotels, restaurants, shopping, nightlife, and local blogs.
I believe in the algorithm and most recently crowd sourcing. Mahalo can he considered the latter, even though it’s being heavily moderated. I don’t see myself using Mahalo before resorting to Google since the information will most likely be incomplete.
The weakest link is ultimately the moderators, since it’s hard for them to scale with a consistent quality (unlike the algorithm) over all the different fields of information. A moderator might be good at iding a good recipe or Paris Hilton site, but can they get more technical. The true question for Mahalo is: Now that they’ve got humans crawling the web rather than a server, are hamster powered servers next.
I guess where Mahalo falls short is where Google’s Knol might actually work. Mahalo seems to be geared most towards the not so tech savvy users, which is pretty much most people out there. There is room in this space, as proven by About.com with 38 million unique monthly visitors.
(Via Silicon Alley Insider.)
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