incuTANK: Sharing ideas and innovation.

I just wanted to write about a new search engine called Mahalo.  Search technology seems to be one of major focus points of some new Web 2.0 firms gaining great attention from the blogs and VC’s.  Generally, I use google for pretty much all my searches with the rare occasion using yahoo.  Google doesn’t do a great job and I must say those links can get overbearing some times.  But the shear convenience of google makes it hard to resist.   

Before I tell you about Mahalo, just want to mention Powerset which is a new search engine that uses everyday speech or natural language to power its logarithms’.  Instead of using “+” and random searches like “boston and pizza” you can just write what you want like “I am looking for pizza in boston”.  It is currently in beta and I haven’t heard of anything about its result sets but I am excited to see it in action.   

Mahalo is a new search engine that is powered by humans!  Mahalo concentrates on the top % of web searches and develops page results for each set manually.  These page results are created by their team of workers to sort thru the web and find the most relevant and best sites relating to that term.  So a search for the iPhone results in a Top 7 Mahalo pages, a youtube video on functionality, recent news, information/reviews and blogs.  The results set are very intuitive and looks to be comprehensive enough where I wouldn’t need to do another search.  http://www.mahalo.com/Iphone to see my results.For searches that aren’t yet created, it returns google results (worst case scenario).  A cool feature is you can actually help the firm create page search results and submit back to Mahalo (if accepted, you get paid!).  Not sure of the cost structure but I assume they are burning thru cash as they pay their workers to manually create search pages.  They should be fine as they have received significant funding (Mark Cuban is an investor)