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Mahalo - just not sure...
June 4, 2007

I am not sure exactly how to pronounce Mahalo, the new human-powered search engine that is heating up the blogs right now, but I am pretty sure it won't be topping your school library resource lists any time soon. I am not saying this is a bad thing, It really just is what it is. This is human-powered...not curriculum driven. As such, the site is driven by what people want to know, not what we want them to know. It is to be expected, then, that the categories include television, travel, food, music, products...oh, and maybe a wee bit of news. The top 20 searches include the upcoming iPhone, pizza, Pink Floyd, and Playstation (how alleteraive!).

As explained on the Mahalo FAQ page, the goal of the site is to provide a better search experience by using human mediation for the top 10,000 search terms. By looking at a profile for one of the "guides" that are crafting the search pages, we can see that there is (at least in this case) a pretty good amount of transparency into the author's qualifications and work. A sample page, in this case for a MacBook Pro, reveals the type of information provided by the guide.

Initial impression? The infant child of Wikipedia and the old Yahoo! Directory. The search results have some room for growth; why for instance, did a search on "library" return "Related Pages" suggestions for Nashville, mustard, and root beer? Simply because the root beer page has a link to "Stout Billy's Information Library?" Still, there are some interesting possibilities here. I can certainly see something like this becoming a "popular" search engine in the sense that it addresses what is in the pop information collective right now. 

It will be interesting to watch this grow and develop...

Posted by Chris Harris on June 4, 2007 | Comments (2)