So Mahalo is out in alpha/beta/gamma, and I checked it out today. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a new hybrid search engine. A mixture of web 2.0 look and feel, human edited directory, encyclopedia knockoff, search engine wanna-be, and ego. It looks like any other web 2.0 concoction that designers have tossed on us in the past 18 months or so. It is in alpha, so please take my thoughts for what they are worth at this point in time. Also note that they plan on hand editing approximately the top 10,000 search terms.

The idea behind Mahalo is to merge the human edited directory aspect of DMOZ with a world class search engine to provide a better search engine that is as free of spam as possible, maybe a Wikipedia type site (only with editors who know what they are talking about). Editors are expected to be paid, maybe so users won’t run into the inherent flaws of having volunteer editors like DMOZ (months of wait time for possibly never even being reviewed and the occasional back door review payments). Search results will have a human edited page mixed with real time search results. They obviously are just starting.

I did a quick few searches to test the outcomes. The first, a term that I was sure they would not have hand edited — crock pot rice (don’t laugh too much, I have a site that gets very steady if not spectacular traffic from this search term). As expected Mahalo had not hand edited this term. What was not expected was the return of a link to their Condaleeza Rice page. I’m pretty sure that Condie is not known for her cooking recipes, so it appears they just did a simple “OR” on the terms to find related results. My rising fourth grader daughter will be learning that trick this summer when I get her coding some PHP for me.

So, I followed that up with the spamdaddy term of all time, viagra. Surely that term had been hand edited to minimize spam. Wrong! No hand edited results, but there was a nice link to their Rush Limbaugh results page. Now that page was hand edited, and I can see why I may like Mahalo for some things.

After my little trip there today, I can say with 100 percent certainty, that it is possible I might visit Mahalo at some point to perform a search. I can see the value in that.

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