Mahalo.com
Encyclopedia
Mahalo.com is a web directory
(or human search engine
) and Internet-based knowledge exchange (question and answer site) launched in alpha test in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis
. It differentiates itself from algorithmic search engines like Google
and Ask.com
, as well as other directory sites like DMOZ
and Yahoo!
by tracking and building hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular search terms. Mahalo means "thank you" in Hawaiian
.
s and write search engine results page
s that include text listings, as well as other media, such as photos and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. The company also pays freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation. The pages are approved by contract quality control site members on the QC Team prior to appearing in the main index.
Mahalo.com's approach is similar to that employed by Ask.com
in 1998.
Mahalo.com started with the top 4,000 search terms in popular categories like travel, entertainment, cars, food, health care and sports and was adding about 500 more terms per week with the goal of covering the top 10,000 by the end of 2007.
This goal had been exceeded when, in December 2007, Mahalo announced that its index has reached 25,000 pages, a year earlier than expected.
Mahalo.com also offers "how to" guides that contain instructions on popular topics in an editorial fashion. Mahalo.com will deliver results for less popular searches from Google.
from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware
, or engage in phishing
scams. Webmasters have a vested interest in seeing their sites listed. Jason Calacanis
, the founder of Mahalo.com, has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo!
, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization
practitioners. Mahalo.com's reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem by producing search results that are more relevant to the user. However, there are ads in multiple locations on Mahalo.com's pages.
was hired by Mahalo.com to produce a daily video show for the site. Her first video was an interview with Leeroy Jenkins
. Belmont left Mahalo Daily in 2008 to co-host the Revision3 series Tekzilla
.
After a month-long search, Belmont's replacement was announced on June 5, 2008. Former cable sports show host Leah D'Emilio
won Mahalo Vlog Idol and co-hosted the show with Mahalo.com employee Lon Harris until leaving the show in March 2009.
Mahalo Daily produces a segment every Friday titled "This Week in YouTube". Since D'Emilio's departure from the show, Lon Harris has hosted the show with guest Shira Lazar
.
in that it allows users to pose questions regarding a wide variety of subjects, and those questions will be answered by other users. A key difference between the two services is that Mahalo Answers allows questioners to give a monetary reward (called a "tip" on the site) to the user who provides the most helpful response. Tips are paid using "Mahalo dollars", which are bought using PayPal
, and, once earned, can then either be used to tip other users or be cashed in at the Mahalo Store. At one time, Mahalo Dollars could be converted to cash at a 75% exchange rate, but this ended in June 2010. Mahalo.com has launched revenue sharing to their Answers users, giving both asker and answerer a portion of Google AdSense money in the form of Mahalo Dollars that can be used only to purchase items in the Mahalo.com online store.
, CEO of Ask.com
(at the time of this quote) said, "Just like a lot of people who watch movies think they can be scriptwriters, there are a lot of people who use search engines who think they can build a search engine." Lanzone cited the fact that about 60% of search inquiries to Ask are unique as just one of the challenges of running a search engine. Google claims that 20% to 25% of its search inquiries have never been used before.
At the SMX Conference in June 2007, Google software engineer Matt Cutts
explained that while he supports different approaches to search, like Mahalo, it is untrue that humans have nothing to do with Google's search results. As examples of human involvement he cited Google's use of hyperlink
analysis, toolbar
voting, and user reporting of spam. Cutts suggested that Google would evolve to take advantage of social media
.
's Michael Moritz
, an early investor in both Google and Yahoo!; Elon Musk
, founder of PayPal
; and News Corporation
. Other disclosed investors include Dallas Mavericks
owner Mark Cuban
and AOL
chairman Ted Leonsis
Jason Calacanis
has said that he has enough funding to run Mahalo for four or five years without making a profit. Mahalo eventually hopes to make a profit by selling ads next to search results.
As of April 21, 2010 Mahalo had 9.4 million global (5.7 million US) unique monthly visitors, down from a peak of 14.1 million global (7.4 million US) unique monthly visitors, according to Quantcast
.
On October 22, 2008, Calacanis announced that he was laying off 10 percent of Mahalo's employees (2 persons) due to the economic downturn. Conflicting reports suggest that the percentage of employees let go was much higher, with reports stating that it was a third of staff.
On March 1, 2011, Calacanis and company president, Jason Rapp, announced via email that the recent changes in the Google
search algorithm had significantly reduced traffic, resulting in the need to lay off about 10% of Mahalo employees. Google made these changes in late February 2011 in an effort to improve the quality of high-ranking search results. The changes by Google came after growing complaints that its search algorithm was being exploited by content farms that produce little value to users. According to software firm Sistrix, Mahalo's Google generated search traffic declined by over 75% since these changes were made.
Web directory
A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links....
(or human search engine
Human Search Engine
A human search engine is a search engine that uses human participation to filter the search results and assist users in clarifying their search request...
) and Internet-based knowledge exchange (question and answer site) launched in alpha test in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture, Weblogs, Inc., capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL....
. It differentiates itself from algorithmic search engines like Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
and Ask.com
Ask.com
Ask is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...
, as well as other directory sites like DMOZ
Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...
and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
by tracking and building hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular search terms. Mahalo means "thank you" in Hawaiian
Hawaiian language
The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...
.
Directory
Mahalo.com's directory contracts human editors to review websiteWebsite
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
s and write search engine results page
Search engine results page
A search engine results page , is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the Keywords have matched content within the page...
s that include text listings, as well as other media, such as photos and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. The company also pays freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation. The pages are approved by contract quality control site members on the QC Team prior to appearing in the main index.
Mahalo.com's approach is similar to that employed by Ask.com
Ask.com
Ask is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...
in 1998.
Mahalo.com started with the top 4,000 search terms in popular categories like travel, entertainment, cars, food, health care and sports and was adding about 500 more terms per week with the goal of covering the top 10,000 by the end of 2007.
This goal had been exceeded when, in December 2007, Mahalo announced that its index has reached 25,000 pages, a year earlier than expected.
Mahalo.com also offers "how to" guides that contain instructions on popular topics in an editorial fashion. Mahalo.com will deliver results for less popular searches from Google.
Search Results Quality
Mahalo.com states its goal is to improve search results by eliminating search spamSpamdexing
In computing, spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes...
from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware
Malware
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...
, or engage in phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
scams. Webmasters have a vested interest in seeing their sites listed. Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture, Weblogs, Inc., capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL....
, the founder of Mahalo.com, has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
practitioners. Mahalo.com's reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem by producing search results that are more relevant to the user. However, there are ads in multiple locations on Mahalo.com's pages.
Mahalo Daily
Veronica BelmontVeronica Belmont
Veronica Ann Belmont is the co-host of the Revision3 show Tekzilla alongside Patrick Norton, and the former host of the monthly PlayStation 3-based video on demand program Qore. Formerly she was the host for the Mahalo Daily podcast and a producer and associate editor for CNET Networks, Inc...
was hired by Mahalo.com to produce a daily video show for the site. Her first video was an interview with Leeroy Jenkins
Leeroy Jenkins
Leeroy Jenkins, sometimes misspelled Leroy Jenkins and often elongated with numerous additional letters, is an Internet phenomenon named for a player character created by Ben Schulz in Blizzard Entertainment's MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The character became popular due to a video of the game that...
. Belmont left Mahalo Daily in 2008 to co-host the Revision3 series Tekzilla
Tekzilla
Tekzilla is a biweekly video podcast on the Revision3 network. It is currently hosted by Patrick Norton, Veronica Belmont and Robert Heron with Garnett Lee and Roger Chang as frequent guest hosts...
.
After a month-long search, Belmont's replacement was announced on June 5, 2008. Former cable sports show host Leah D'Emilio
Leah D'Emilio
Leah D'Emilio is an American media personality. She was the co-host of the Mahalo Daily podcast show alongside Lon Harris.-Background:...
won Mahalo Vlog Idol and co-hosted the show with Mahalo.com employee Lon Harris until leaving the show in March 2009.
Mahalo Daily produces a segment every Friday titled "This Week in YouTube". Since D'Emilio's departure from the show, Lon Harris has hosted the show with guest Shira Lazar
Shira Lazar
Shira Lazar is a Canadian television personality, actress, writer and video blogger who currently resides and works in Los Angeles....
.
Mahalo Answers
On December 15, 2008, Mahalo launched a new service called Mahalo Answers. The service is similar to Yahoo! AnswersYahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven question-and-answer site or a knowledge market launched by Yahoo! on June 28, 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users...
in that it allows users to pose questions regarding a wide variety of subjects, and those questions will be answered by other users. A key difference between the two services is that Mahalo Answers allows questioners to give a monetary reward (called a "tip" on the site) to the user who provides the most helpful response. Tips are paid using "Mahalo dollars", which are bought using PayPal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....
, and, once earned, can then either be used to tip other users or be cashed in at the Mahalo Store. At one time, Mahalo Dollars could be converted to cash at a 75% exchange rate, but this ended in June 2010. Mahalo.com has launched revenue sharing to their Answers users, giving both asker and answerer a portion of Google AdSense money in the form of Mahalo Dollars that can be used only to purchase items in the Mahalo.com online store.
Critics
Jim LanzoneJim Lanzone
Jim Lanzone is the current President of CBS Interactive, which operates key websites including CNET, CBS.com, Gamespot, CBS News, Metacritic, CBS Sports, Chow, MaxPreps.com and TV.com. He took over as President from Neil Ashe in March 2011.. Prior to joining CBS Interactive, Lanzone was the CEO of...
, CEO of Ask.com
Ask.com
Ask is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...
(at the time of this quote) said, "Just like a lot of people who watch movies think they can be scriptwriters, there are a lot of people who use search engines who think they can build a search engine." Lanzone cited the fact that about 60% of search inquiries to Ask are unique as just one of the challenges of running a search engine. Google claims that 20% to 25% of its search inquiries have never been used before.
At the SMX Conference in June 2007, Google software engineer Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. In an interview with USA Today in June 2008, Cutts provided advice on how to optimize search results on Google.-Career:...
explained that while he supports different approaches to search, like Mahalo, it is untrue that humans have nothing to do with Google's search results. As examples of human involvement he cited Google's use of hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
analysis, toolbar
Google Toolbar
Google Toolbar is an Internet browser toolbar only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox .-Google Toolbar 1.0 December 11, 2000:New features:*Direct access to the Google search functionality from any web page*Web Site search...
voting, and user reporting of spam. Cutts suggested that Google would evolve to take advantage of social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
.
Ownership and funding
Lead investors in Mahalo.com include Sequoia CapitalSequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...
's Michael Moritz
Michael Moritz
Michael Moritz is a Welsh-American venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park, California in Silicon Valley, and a former member of the board of directors of Google Inc.-Life and career:...
, an early investor in both Google and Yahoo!; Elon Musk
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is an American engineer and entrepreneur heritage best known for co-founding PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors. He is currently the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity...
, founder of PayPal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....
; and News Corporation
News Corporation
News Corporation or News Corp. is an American multinational media conglomerate. It is the world's second-largest media conglomerate as of 2011 in terms of revenue, and the world's third largest in entertainment as of 2009, although the BBC remains the world's largest broadcaster...
. Other disclosed investors include Dallas Mavericks
Dallas Mavericks
The Dallas Mavericks are a professional basketball team based in Dallas, Texas. They are members of the Southwest Division of the Western Conference of the National Basketball Association , and the reigning NBA champions, having defeated the Miami Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals.According to a 2011...
owner Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban is an American business magnate and investor. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network HDNet....
and AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
chairman Ted Leonsis
Ted Leonsis
Theodore John Leonsis is an Internet pioneer, sports team owner, venture capital investor, filmmaker, author and philanthropist. His early new media company, Redgate Communications was acquired by America Online in 1994, and Leonsis became a senior AOL executive for the next 13 years...
Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture, Weblogs, Inc., capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL....
has said that he has enough funding to run Mahalo for four or five years without making a profit. Mahalo eventually hopes to make a profit by selling ads next to search results.
Traffic and growth
Mahalo had experienced significant growth since it was launched in May 2007. Mahalo.com traffic had increased from roughly ten thousand visitors a month in July 2007, to two million visitors a month in January 2008. After six months of flat traffic in 2008 the site continued to grow.As of April 21, 2010 Mahalo had 9.4 million global (5.7 million US) unique monthly visitors, down from a peak of 14.1 million global (7.4 million US) unique monthly visitors, according to Quantcast
Quantcast
Quantcast is a California based company that provides publishers and marketers with the ability to understand, deliver and reach their best audiences at a massive scale...
.
On October 22, 2008, Calacanis announced that he was laying off 10 percent of Mahalo's employees (2 persons) due to the economic downturn. Conflicting reports suggest that the percentage of employees let go was much higher, with reports stating that it was a third of staff.
On March 1, 2011, Calacanis and company president, Jason Rapp, announced via email that the recent changes in the Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
search algorithm had significantly reduced traffic, resulting in the need to lay off about 10% of Mahalo employees. Google made these changes in late February 2011 in an effort to improve the quality of high-ranking search results. The changes by Google came after growing complaints that its search algorithm was being exploited by content farms that produce little value to users. According to software firm Sistrix, Mahalo's Google generated search traffic declined by over 75% since these changes were made.