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Since Mahalo was released the blogosphere has been abuzz with news that it is the next big innovation in search. In that time, I have tried to hold my tongue, knowing that as a human edited search engine it would need a bit of time to reach scale. Now that some months have gone by, and the initial buzz has worn off, I have taken a longer look at Mahalo. Lets see how it stands up to some choice searches.

Failures

My first test was to check a term that I have searched for quite a few times in Google, “Fourier Transform.” As an Engineer by trade, there is a canon of jargon that I search for almost daily. Google or Wikipedia has been extremely good at pushing me useful links and generally providing substance.

How does Mahalo stack up? For this relatively simple search, Mahalo fails in several regards. First and foremost, my search doesn’t have a custom page attached to it — which, I suppose, can be forgiven. Unfortunately, the ‘related’ results which were my first fall back are not even close to what I was looking for — unless “Cannabis Reclassification” is secretly linked to mathematical transforms.

The only saving grace of this result was the Google result, the first entry of which was the Wikipedia page on Fourier Transforms which provides a wealth of information on the subject.

As you can see, I had a similar problem when searching for the AI programming language LISP. Obscure certainly but I would imagine that results that you would truly be hard pressed to find information on are not the common ones that Mahalo indexes but the ones that you have to do a bit of digging for.

Success

Where Mahalo does shine is when you’re interested in the cast of characters that make up Web 2.0. There are pages for almost anyone that you can imagine from Jason Calacanis (depicted below) to Robert Scoble. As an engine for vanity searching Mahalo scores high.

Let me not forget to underscore the point that if you are searching for very common terms, Mahalo provides some fantastic resources. The biggest problem I have with it is that most of these terms already have equal, if not better, Wikipedia pages.

Web 2.0 Roundup

What’s really interesting is that even a less popular search engine like Ask.com preformed hands over fist better than Mahalo for all of my searches. It not only gave me more relevant results higher on the page, but also provided multimedia resources, meta-information and related searches that were actually related

The final prognosis? Mahalo is an interesting time waster that still has a long way to go if it is ever going to break into the mainstream search market. The best thing for Jason and the Mahalo team to recognize is that while creating “popular” pages might be enough to draw shallow traffic, your best bet for lasting utility is to start from more obscure terms and really use the power of those human editors of yours to drive value. A good start are the “How To” articles that they have put together.

Lets face it, if Wikipedia could do it, Mahalo certainly has a chance.

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