Mahalo Ecrans translation (draft)
Jason asked for a translation of this French story via his Del.icio.us feed, and I had a few minutes to kill before my flight, so figured I’d take a crack at it. It’s been approximately 1 million years since I last opened a French textbook; consider yourself warned… ;-)
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Mahalo, the hand-crafted search engine
Could Mahalo mark the return of the web directories?
by Sebastien Delahaye
Friday June 1, 2007
“We’re here to help.” It’s the slogan of Mahalo, a search engine just launched in Alpha version. Created by Jason Calacanis, founder and ex-chairman of Weblogs Inc (which publishes many blogs, including Engadget, the most popular blog in the world), Mahalo does not play in the same league as Google. Where the American giant uses complex algorithms to provide relevant results, Mahalo provides a hand-picked selection of sites with accompanying notes. To produce these results, Calacanis employs 40 people as “guides” who traverse the Web in the search of relevant information on precise subjects.
For the moment, Mahalo contains 4000 pages of results, only in English, on subjects as various as scientology, Nicolas Sarkozy and the founder of the company. For requests which don’t have results pages yet, Mahalo provides Google’s results. In the long term, Calacanis wants Mahalo to provide results pages for the 10,000 most popular search phrases on the Web. This goal also enables us to guess at Mahalo’s true objective: to appear in the first page of Google results for those same requests, in order to make the company profitable. Seen in this light, Mahalo seems to be taking particular aim at the space currently occupied by the Wikipédia encyclopedia on Google.
In addition, Mahalo, proclaimed the “the world’s first human-powered search engine”, also closely resembles the DMOZ directory. On DMOZ, the role of the paid Mahalo “guides” is held by volunteer “experts.” Created in 1998, DMOZ today provides results for 700,000 subjects and in nearly 80 languages. Also worth noting is that DMOZ, whose contents are freely reusable, is published by AOL, a company for which Jason Calacanis worked until last November.