Check Out Mahalo

Jason Calacanis launched Mahalo today.

Serial entrepreneur Jason McCabe Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine, at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference. The site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet’s 4,000 most popular search terms completed. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.

“We’re in month five of a five-year project,” explained Calacanis, “but we wanted to get some real-world feedback, so we’re launching it early here at D Conference.”

The site is focused on the top English-language search terms, including verticals such as travel, products, news, entertainment, sports, food, and health. “Google’s mission is to index the world’s information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index,” said Calacanis. “It’s my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we’re going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years. I am really looking forward to hearing what people think of the Alpha,” he added.

Imagine that… In a world full of computers, microchips, internet technology and Web 2.0, someone finally realized what was missing from search results. The human element. Someone to make sure the results you get are relevant to the information you seek.

I gave it a test run just a few moments ago and I must admit the results were quite pleasing. I didn’t have to wade through four pages of irrelevant results to find what I was looking for, and the way they break the results down into groups for news, blogs, videos and media is outstanding.

One thing I did notice though, is that some of the more current “newsie” related topics were much more generalized and the results were a bit dated, heck some of them didn’t return any results at all. I must remember, however, Mahalo is still “alpha” and we’re lucky we get to play with it this early on.

They have created 4,000 results pages thus far and plan to have 25,000 by the end of 2008. Wow. (I wonder if they’re hiring, I am a research junkie you know). I wonder how long it will be before they have an entry for “slobokan”? When they do, hopefully it won’t include the question “Did you mean Slobodan?”

I congratulate Jason and the entire team at Mahalo for bringing this awesome concept to life. I can hardly wait to see it grow.