Diorex

Jason Calacanis recently unveiled Mahalo, which is a human edited search engine.

I for one think it just might work. (Todd at Stuntdubl disagrees) It is becoming more and more common for me to not find what I am looking for with a Google search, especially on commercial type searches.

SEO’s (and rightfully so, it is after all money) have gamed the engines on anything and everything worth gaming the engines over. Lets take a generic and high volume search for the word “Google” on both engines.

Google’s results are just an uncategorized list of links to different Google products. Mahalo has links to the company, the charitable arm, GMail, Youtube and several other things someone with that generic query might want. Then they go a step farther and list news articles about the company from a variety of sources, then a recent stock chart, then links to all of the products and acquisitions made by the company, blog entries, even a hacks and tutorial section, a criticism section and links to other companies someone searching the generic term Google might want to find. In fact just about anything I want to learn about google can be found within 1-2 clicks from these results.

Try eBay, Apple, Yahoo and others and the results are consistently better.

What about Celebrities…

Take Paris Hilton (who is now staying at the 1star Lynwood Hilton…) her page is nicely broken out into the Top 7 which is about the same top7 as Google, but followed by sections devoted to Photos, Videos, News, Biography, Timeline, Gossip and merchandise. It has a few dozen links on the page nicely organized and easy to find.

What about the darling of Dallas - Tony Romo - I think Google wins this one, but mostly because Mahalo suggest to me he is playing for the Dolphins and trying to date Jessica Simpson (2 strikes…) Otherwise, once again there is a lot more links neatly categorized for someone trying to get information about him.

Lets take something Spammy (I think they should re-name spam to Viagra or maybe Blue Pill) and search for Viagra. Noone who is not an SEO or a spammer is gonna tell me that the 5th link in Google - Yacht Club of America - which then redirects to a pharmacy is what I was looking for. Mahalo has awesome information, links to blogs, natural alternatives, plus its top 7 are almost the same as Google’s results.

I for one cannot wait to see how they build it out. Will they be able to stay on top of thousands of news topics, celebrities, and other searches or will the pages grow stale quickly? For now, I am just disappointed to see that most of what I searched for returned ‘no results’ even when closely related. i.e. Buy Viagra.

Certainly an alpha product, but it will be interesting to see how easy it is to game it and how fresh the content remains. As an internet marketer I love google, as an internet user I am ready for a better alternative.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Cool Sites, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.