There is a new search directory in town called Mahalo. Do we really need human edited directories?

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine backed by Jason Calacanis. Among Calacanis’ endeavors you find Weblogs Inc., which was sold to AOL in 2005 for 25 million US dollars.

Mahalo means “thank you” in Hawaiian and the entire site has a friendly, sunny atmosphere. There is a reason for this: Mahalo’s distinguishing feature is its human touch.

When you do a search on Mahalo, you don’t search an index of millions or billions of web pages like you do at Yahoo!, Google, Windows Live and their competitors. You search (or even browse) a relatively tiny index of searches that have been preformed for you by Mahalo employed web searchers, called guides. The search results have then been filtered by these guides and when you do your search, only the really good stuff will appear.

(See our article Introduction to Mahalo, a new human-powered search directory for information on how to search and submit to Mahalo).

Size matters

The size of the Web is getting to be a problem. Almost any search query will return hundreds of thousands of results in the large spider powered search engines. And even though the search engines are constantly working to hone their algorithms and bring you the most relevant results, even the very top results from the most popular search engines are sometimes infected by spam.

In this light, a search engine with a very small, very good index has its merits. Mahalo is starting with 4,000 Web pages, which each contain a lists of high quality web sites.

They hope to add about 500 pages per week. At this rate, their index will never be close to the size of the large crawler based search engines, but that is OK for Calacanis. His goal is for Mahalo to address the Web’s 10,000 most popular search terms.

To achieve this, he relies on about 40 employees and aims to have 100 by the end of the year, searching the web to make lists of the most useful Web sites.

Human-powered search

If you have been following the search engine industry for some time, human-powered search is nothing new: Yahoo! started out as a directory with a handful of editors.

The Open Directory Project had success — for some time — using a large base of volunteer editors to collect and organize high quality web sites. (The OPD — or DMOZ as it is also know — continues to power the directories of sites like Google and Pandia.)

The success of Google and other huge crawler based search engines made Yahoo! all but abandon their directory. For years, search engine innovation was dominated by the race to beat Google at their own game.

Around Christmas of 2006, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame declared that search was broken and he knew how to fix it. He announced that he was starting work on a wiki inspired, open source, collaborative search engine.

The amount of hype that this story resulted in is not only due to the media skills of Mr. Wales and the success of Wikipedia, but of a real hunger for something really new on the search engine scene. Even though it is an exaggeration to claim that search is broken, there is definitely need for some fresh thinking.

Cha-cha is another human-powered search startup. They combine a crawler based search engine with human guides, so if their regular search results leave you wanting more, Cha-Cha will connect you with a live human guide who will find the information for you. This works through an instant messaging-style search session. This strategy is only as good as the guides they recruit.

When I tested Cha-cha and asked a guide for good alternative search engines, Inktomi and Teoma were among the recommendations. I was not impressed.

Searh direcories designed for search engine optimization

In the last couple of years we have also witnessed the birth of a large number of human edited directories designed to attract paid submissions. The reason for this strategy is that Google, Yahoo! and other regular search engines reward inbound links from authority sites, and if a directory like this is considered to be an authority people will be willing to pay to get included.

There is no doubt that links from directories like the Open Directory and Best of the Web can give you a boost in rankings. As for all the new and unknown directories, it is hard to say. It certainly won’t hurt to get your site listed, as it gives the spiders an additional way of finding your site, but do not hope for much search engine ranking wise.

If Mahalo succeds, however, their strict quality guidelines could lead the search engines to put much emphasis on links from them.

Is Mahalo any good?

According to Calacanis, this is the right time to use human guides to build a directory-style search engine: So many high quality, free search resources are available for Mahalo’s professional web searchers to draw upon.

In an interview he said that “Every innovation that Google comes up with becomes another tool for us to move up the stack. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.”

But how can Mahalo improve on the search results of Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live and the others?

Yesterday, I was searching all the major search engines for the home pages of some hotels in Prague. All I got were endless lists of more or less suspicious hotel booking services.

On Mahalo it was easy to find their guide to Prague hotels, containing a list of selected luxury hotels, moderate hotels, affordable hotels and hostels in Prague along with seven web sites recommending and reviewing Prague hotels.

If you are searching for something that often returns spammed results, like travel advice, or if you are searching for recipes and want to avoid sites covered wall-to-wall with ads, Mahalo might just be the place to go.

But Mahalo fails once you have a precise query: Italian recipes are not a problem, a search for risotto recipes returns no results. I found several good introductions to Buddhism om Mahalo, but nothing on Theravada Buddhism.

See also: Pandia Powersearch’s list of human edited search directories.
Web Directories: Love ‘ Em Or Hate ‘Em, article by Pandia Guest Writer David Wallace.