Start-Up Adds a Human Touch

Battling 'Search Spam,' Mahalo Uses Editors To Run Web Queries

It turns out a human being in two, three or four hours can build a search result that's much better than Google, Yahoo or Ask," said Jason Calacanis, a former executive at Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit, who founded Mahalo (the start-up's name means "thank you" in Hawaiian). Mahalo's results pages include the top seven sites for a query, other categorized information and links to other Web pages -- most provided by a human editor. Full Story »

Posted by Julian Friedland

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Silhouette_sml
3.1
by Eric Campbell - May. 31, 2007

What's in the story is good - it's what is left out that is a problem. What is the critical mass of queries you need pages for in order to make the site worth going to? How long will it take to get there? How much better are their results than Google's? An example would have been illuminating. What is their cost per results page compared with Google and how do they generate the ad income to pay for it?

(7 answers)

Eric's Rating

Overall
3.1

Average
from 7 answers
Quality
3.0
Fairness
4.0
Information
3.0
Sourcing
4.0
Context
2.0
Popularity
3.5
Recommendation
2.0
Credibility
5.0
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