Mahalo is a Search Engine Worth Trying

I came across Mahalo today and was quite pleased with how it worked.  Of course Mahalo is the word in Hawaiian for thank you – which is what you might be saying when you use this search engine.

It kind of reminds me of the search engine I reviewed a while back called Cuil.

After doing some research, I’ve learned that they’ve only been around about a 18 months and are driving about 2,700,000 visitors a month according to Compete.com as of this post.

By comparison, it is estimated that Google gets about 132,000,000 million visits a month.

What makes Mahalo different is a few things:

1. They say that they are a human powered search engine that is different from the others that use software and algorithms.  They claim to produce “hand crafted” results for you.
2. The result pages are great! You will get pictures, text, videos and other media. In addition, I found links to some very cool stuff that never came up on comparable Google or Yahoo! searches.
3. They claim to list quality websites and links you wouldn’t find at other search engines over low quality spam sites with excessive advertising.

Their whole process is mildly reminiscent to me of the early days at Yahoo! when people were categorizing stuff on the web by hand and then it just got to big to handle, so they automated it and the rest is history.

Having said that, I did a search for BMW M5 on Mahalo and was totally impressed with the result page that I got.

If I was going to make a page about that car based on stuff from the web, it would be very similar to what I saw.

In comparison, I did a search for Brooks Van Norman, and the result page said “we’ve never heard of you”.

Why am I not in here?

While I almost closed my browser at that point, until I saw a link that said “Create a Brooks Van Norman page”.

So I did.

…by merely adding the link to this blog!

We’ll see if those human editors think I’m good enough to be listed in their cool search engine!

Anyway, I like Mahalo.  I would call it a Web 3.0 search engine – a social media based search engine with morals.

Let’s watch and see if they can scale…

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