Like Google, only hand-crafted
January 13th, 2008 • Search, Social
Just stumbled upon a Firefox extension from the people at Mahalo.
Not Earth-shaking, I know, but quietly cool. Mahalo, in case you’ve been holidaying on Mars for the last six months, in the new search engine from Jason Calacanis, the entrepreneur who brought you such legendary web properties as WeblogsInc (the power behind Engadget and Autoblog).
The difference between it and Google, Yahoo and their ilk lies in how Mahalo’s results are created. They’re done by hand. Calacanis has a team picking the pages to be highlighted in popular searches, a task that’s analogous to building the pyramids using a trowel and wood putty.
Which would make Mahalo laughable, were it not for the fact that Jason’s team is quietly getting there. I ran a few queries by the site this afternoon, and it’s almost usable. A bunch of tabs greet top the results page, with options to review results from Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Flickr.
And the main Mahalo results tab is an SEO expert’s wet dream. Search for ‘iPod review’, and you get a directory page with such spider-friendly terms as ‘iPod Classic Reviews’, ‘iPod Buying Guide’ and ‘iPod Nano News’. Give it 12 months, and Mahalo will have just about every major search term captured in an uber-directory that Google (ironically) will love.
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