Uncategorized · February 4, 2008
4 Comments

Mahalo: Human Powered Search

I’ve just been poin­ted at Mahalo (thanks Phil,) a new search engine. What sets it aside from the main­stream engines, is that it’s main­tained by humans, rather than robots. Obvi­ously, that raises con­cerns about it’s com­plete­ness, but it also means that you can trust its res­ults not to be SEO-​​spam. In my lim­ited test­ing, I’ve found it very good, with nicely presen­ted, cat­egor­ised and, most import­antly, rel­ev­ant res­ults. It also provides res­ults from the major robot-​​backed engines as well, in case they don’t have what you need indexed yet.

I doubt it’s going to unseat google any time soon, but I’m going to trial using it as my search engine of choice for a week or so, and see how it goes. I’ll report back when I’ve actu­ally used it in anger.

Comments

4 Responses to “Mahalo: Human Powered Search”
  1. Thanks for check­ing us out, be sure to also check out:

    http://​green​house​.mahalo​.com/​S​p​e​c​i​a​l​:​F​o​l​l​o​w​D​o​w​n​l​oad

    This tool­bar allows you to add your own links to pages as well. Every link is then reviewed by a human before being included. Look for the “recom­mend this page” part of the tool bar.

    Mahalo!

  2. Will says:

    That would cer­tainly be a use­ful addi­tion, and key to the site’s suc­cess, I think; get­ting sites indexed, so that people can find what they’re look­ing for without fall­ing through to the included google res­ults must be the make or break for it.

  3. Marcus says:

    please have a look at http://​www​.oneview​.co​.uk , it is also a human powered search engine and just star­ted in the UK.

    oneview’s main fea­ture is social book­mark­ing, but oneview is focused on recom­mend­a­tions of friends. oneview add’s each “Index” of your friends to your own Index and with time, you will build your per­fect search engine with filtered and recom­men­ded web­sites, Artikels, Videos, etc. In Ger­many there are Mem­bers of oneview which have now access to over 40.000 “private” recom­men­ded and filtered links from “friends”.

    It has its own social algorithm, so oneview‘s search engine tech­no­logy will provide you with rel­ev­ant search res­ults as it growths.

    In UK oneview has just star­ted, so there is cur­rently no big Index.

    In ger­many oneview is the largest social book­mark­ing platt­form with over 5,5 mil­lion recom­men­ded and filtered websites.

    Your feed­back would be great.

    Thank you,

    M.

Trackbacks

Check out what others are saying about this post...
  1. […] so I’m going to write some­thing instead. A quick look back in time tells me that I’d prom­ised a second opin­ion on Mahalo once I’d had time to try it out, and since I’ve had time to […]



Leave a Reply