Mahalo Answers takes on Yahoo! Answers with money

Filed under: Social Software, Search, Web

Mahalo Answers takes on Yahoo! Answers with money

by Brad Linder Dec 15th 2008

Search engines are great at answering some types of questions. Want to know what Barack Obama's kids names are? No problem. Google can help. But some questions are a bit trickier, like "what's the best way to find a new tech job after you've been laid off?" Mahalo wants to be able to answer both types of questions.

Mahalo launched about a year and a half ago as a sort of human-powered search engine. Now the site has curated search results for around 100,000 search terms. They're sort of like Google search results, except human beings have helped select the items they think you'd be most interested to highlight.

And today the company launched Mahalo Answers, which fills several functions. First, it allows anyone at all to post a question and get answers from Mahalo employees or anyone else who feels the urge to post an answer. Mahalo may incorporate those answers into its general search results, which helps flesh out the content on the main Mahalo.com page. But there's another way Mahalo, and you, can make money using Mahalo answers.

When you're asking a question you can offer a "tip" for the best answers. Tips are paid in Mahalo Dollars, which is another way of saying US dollars. But Mahalo takes a cut of 25% when you withdraw any money in your account. So if you've made $100 by providing top notch answers to questions, you can either ask 10 questions and provide $10 tips yourself or you can withdraw $75.

The service will go head to head with Yahoo! Answers, but Yahoo! doesn't allow the exchange of money. The now-defunct Google Answers did, but Mahalo Answers is much more flexible. You can choose to provide tips for multiple answers. Or if you don't like any of the answers you can rescind your tip, although it will show up on your profile which may affect the quality of answers you get to future questions.

Mahalo Answers also allows users to post questions and answers with video, pictures, and music while Yahoo! Answers is a text-only site. Of course, Yahoo! already has a significant user base, which means that you're much more likely to get a good answer from the Yahoo! community today than from the Mahalo community. But who knows about tomorrow?

Tags: google-answers, mahalo, mahalo-answers, yahoo-answers

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters