Mahalo - a human power search engine

Recently visited Mahalo (http://www.mahalo.com/) a ‘human powered’ search engine founded by Jason Calacanis. Gave an invited presentation to the Mahalo employees, including Jason, on search engine branding (see a short paper on the topic of search engine branding here).

It was a really interesting discussion, and the combined presentation and Q&A lasted a long time (about 2 hours!). Luckily, we did it over lunch! Also, I got to spend some time with several of the folks at Mahalo, including Eric Stephens, the director of user experience and Dan Zinngrabe, a research analyst.

The niche Mahalo is aiming for is really interesting with some obvious applications where it could be successful. Of course, they have a hard row competing in the search engine market, with several tough obstacles, including the branding effect of the major search engines, which was the topic of my talk. Plus, there is the long tail of Web queries and Web topics, so obviously, human power can't do it all.

When asked what I thought it would take to ‘break into’ the search engine market in a big way, I said some type of disruptive technology that improves search results so much that searchers can’t ignore the difference. We can see precedent for this with what AltaVista and Google did when they entered the search engine market. Of course, there is some ‘survivor bias’ in such a view point (i.e., there are some search engines that had disruptive technologies that didn’t make it).

Mahalo has an interesting idea that appears beneficial for the more popular topics, some good people, good financing, and, of course, Jason is a marketer who could sell you your own left shoe. :-)