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.

What do you get when you add Technorati + Mahalo + Google? One part human led guide team, one part ranking of individual posts, and one part powerful algorithm that decides what's hot and what's not, based on what is fed into it.

Loud3r.

Today, Loud3r is launching 25 separate sites on 25 different niche topics that range from Motorcycles to Web 2.0. Big deal, right? There are content gathering tools everywhere these days, why bother with this one?

Each of the 25 niche sites is set up to kickstart its own community, with features reminiscent of Digg. You can give feedback on the stories, and it will help their algorithm get smarter. The more sources that the guide feeds the engine, plus the more you interact, the better user experience you'll get.

So some guy named Steve Jobs got up on stage at something called the WWDC yesterday and talked about some products from a company called...orange or banana? Or was it carrot.

Oh, Apple, that's right.

It was long. And sometimes boring. So thanks to Mahalo Daily, here it is in Sixty Seconds. Did we get our iPhone with iRobot and iHateMakingMyOwnCoffee? We do get Exchange integration and now we're all Mobile with MobileMe and plus Apps for iPhone coming July 11th. Whew, that's a lot.

What they left out was that the new OS Snow Leopard or Rain Monkey or whatever (coming next year), will support multi-core processors, AND be able to take advantage of even more RAM (up to 16TB!).

See for yourselves.

In a similar vein as the Mahalo Follow toolbar, profile links to other social networks have been added to Mahalo Social. We think this is actually pretty cool. In the past, you could include a link to your other profiles on other social networking sites in your Mahalo Social profile. Now that service has just been improved.

When you go to your profile in Mahalo, tabs have been added for some of your other social networking profiles, should you choose to include them. Click on that tab and your profile is launched in an i-frame within Mahalo. If you are logged into your accounts, you can use the service straight from the frame, which is convenient if you want to send a message about something via Twitter. Right now Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr are all supported via tabs.

For people browsing other's profiles, it is a nice way of seeing all the different parts of a person's "social graph" (we hated typing that as much as you hate reading it, but it fit) without having to travel to multiple sites. And for those of us who like to try to keep our profiles as integrated as possible, this provides an elegant solution to not only displaying information, but accessing the services as well.



[via Jason Calacanis]

Can you believe the Squadcast is now on episode 10? Well, we're excited anyway. This week Grant and Christina discuss the future of web search, specifically social search. Christina chats up Jason Calacanis from Mahalo to get the inside scoop on social search and its benefits over traditional methods.

The Squadcast's "The Five" takes a look at five of Download Squad's favorite social search tools and plugins.

Download this episode (mp4)
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Take the jump for show notes and links to items discussed in this episode.

Mahalo's new add-on, called Mahalo Follow for Firefox solves this problem by submitting your link to services including Twitter, Jaiku, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, and Tumblr. This seems to be an extremely useful tool.

To get started, head on over to Mahalo's site and install the Firefox add-in, put in your credentials for your various services, and share away.

If we were Jimmy Wales, we'd have bought a bullet proof vest long ago. Google has just set Jimmy up the bomb; Announcing 'Knol', a human powered index of knowledge which seeks to rival Wikipedia in accountability, and thus accuracy.

Knol will focus on credit for authors who "own" pages within the system. Write a bad page, lose your reputation. Write a better page than one which currently exists, and knock it out of the top spot. It's free market dynamics and modern credit reporting all rolled into one and applied to encyclopedia style information. Google, for it's part, seemingly intends to be hands off in the management of Knol, foregoing any oversight structure similar to that in place at Wikipedia or Mahalo.

While we find this all super interesting, we're going to stop short of prognosticating about the death of Wikipedia. Other industry pundits are calling it "a game changer" and "huge"; We've decided to wait until Monday to predict Wikipedia's imminent death. It's called journalism, look it up.

Oddly enough, there is no current Wikipedia entry for "Knol". Maybe we should pitch in and create one?

[via Paris Lemon]

True social powered search arrives today. Mahalo is beefing up its human-powered search engine by letting users submit additional links directly to any of the site's 26,000 human edited search pages.

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis is announcing the new social link submission network today at the Le Web 3 conference. If Mahalo can attract the right user base, the human-powered search engine could straddle the line between Google and Wikipedia.

Already a year ahead of its published goal to create human edited result pages for 25k of the most popular search terms and, having a declared 400 paid contributors through it's Greenhouse program, Mahalo's next phase blends social networking with search in a way no service has quite attempted before.

Christina and I celebrate all the things we have to be thankful for by talking Vista, Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Mahalo while roasting frozen turkey dinners.

This week's episode features music by Binärpilot.

Hot on the tail of Google and Mahalo, Yahoo! aims to help searchers get to where they want faster.

The goal of Yahoo! OneSearch is "to get things done." Now Yahoo! has integrated a little feature called Search Assist.

Yahoo!'s integrated a real time query suggestion tool earlier this year that helped users refine search queries. With the newly launched Search Assist from Yahoo!, they are suggesting formatting for queries and concepts related to the specific search. This is done through better understanding user's intent and providing them with the information they are looking for in one single search.

It's all about bringing users to the content they want faster, and Yahoo! has done a good job at cutting down the time and provided users with search suggestions, and related concepts to do just that.

Yahoo! has also integrated multimedia into search results. Users can now watch video, view images and listen to audio directly within search results without having to leave a results page.

With Google turning 9 today and still being the search engine for most everyone on the planet, it's only natural the other big dogs are going to try to bump them off and take-over. The newest bid in this effort is Microsoft and the overhaul of their Live Search site, www.live.com.

Live is hyping its search results as a "blended search" where Microsoft attempts to anticipate what its users want. An example used is the search term 'digital camera' with the first results being a sort of product guide of camera models and their reviews taken from the usual suspects Amazon.com and PriceGrabber.com. These show up in the sponsored sites category which most everyone immediately ignores, much like the advertisement pages in magazines that are layed out to look like real articles.

The links that follow the sponsored results look like what you would find at Google. Almost exactly. See the screenshots below.





Sure the presentation and look is different, but that's probably not going to sway users to switch from their favorite Google giant. Apparently, however Microsoft is going to use this "blended search" model for searches associated with products, local businesses, health information and entertainment in the coming month. Wow. That is not very exciting.

As James Carville might put it, "It's about the search results, stupid." If anyone is going to take aim at Google, they are going to have to do better than stabs at incremental innovation.

Mahalo on the other hand, has something new and different. See Mahalo's screenshot below of the search term 'digital camera.' Note there is no suggested sponsor link box - a nice and welcome nod to our intelligence. And they make the results so easy to sift through so we can find exactly what we want. Not to mention the layout is significantly different and completely intuitive. So, which search engine would you rather use? Take our poll.





Update: As you can see from this review, I was surprised that a "new site" looked so blah and boring. Two of our readers (Thanks Craig and Ervanesque!) noticed that the screenshot was of the old site. The reason the site looks old and dry to me is because it is! It's the same site, The new Live.com hasn't been loading most of the time. So depending on when you go to the site, sometimes the new one will load, sometimes the old. Kind of like a moving target. Yes, it's still in beta, but c'mon!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the New site. Yes, it's different, but it's still not very good.




At the time of writing this update, clicking on one of the camera links gets you an error message.



So, in sum, the new overhaul has some kinks and bugs to work out before it's ready for prime time.



[via the New York Times]

At Gnomedex this afternoon, Mahalo, the human-filtered search engine, introduced an intriguing new feature called Follow. Combining Mahalo's clever use of topical experts to build search result pages with website keywords and search technology, Mahalo Follow offers two key features: First, operating as a Firefox add-on (support is on the way for more browsers), Follow will piggyback on queries you enter into any search engine and display Mahalo results in a sidebar if Mahalo has a search page for your query. While Mahalo only has 8,500 search result pages built right now, Mahalo Follow's second and more significant feature is really where the genius lies: In addition to comparing their search results with the likes of Google, Ask.com or Yahoo!, the sidebar will follow along on your surfing (hence its name) and continue to provide relevant results and links based on the sites you surf to. In fact, Follow has a feature I haven't seen done (at least quite the same way) anywhere else: within the Follow results sidebar, the 'Open all' option at the top of each section of links will open every one of those links in tabs. It's like having your own personal search secretary sitting right by your side, continually providing increasingly fine-toothed results without you having to lift a finger; all you need to do is search and browse.

I had the chance to speak with Jason Calacanis, founder of both Mahalo and Weblogs, Inc. (this blog's parent company) yesterday about Follow, and I have to admit that I think they're on to something pretty interesting here. Again, Mahalo's search results are nowhere near as comprehensive as most search engines when it comes to every niche subject you can think of to search on, but that isn't the point. The Mahalo staff uses various tools, custom data and techniques to stay on top of as many subjects as the company can expand to handle competently (and their surging growth, according to Calacanis, has been pretty surprising even to them), and it is in this area where Mahalo Follow shines. In fact, I'll dare to say that uniting Mahalo's human-filtered database in real time with the searches and surfing you're doing could be the next big thing in search.


As you can see, the Mahalo Follow add-on installs a toolbar in Firefox (which you can disable if you want it out of your way) which I'll expand on later. The sidebar of searches you see actually remains hidden until you perform a search at seemingly any engine or even via the search box next to the address bar. I searched for 'digital cameras' in Google, and since Mahalo has their own search results page for this topic, the sidebar kicked into action, displaying their results right alongside Google's. Through this initial action, many of Mahalo Follow's strong features are revealed. First: the sidebar groups links that Mahalo chose for this topic into relevant categories and groups, such as Digital Camera Manufacturers, a Comparison Shopping category that lists the top price watching sites and a Buying Guides and Reviews section. This makes that Open All feature especially handy, since you can open, say, the most popular digital camera guide and review sites in separate tabs with a single click. Now it's time for that searching secretary to kick in.

It's no secret that we've got a soft spot right in the middle of our chest for Mahalo. The company's founder, Jason Calacanis, also founded Weblogs, Inc and, having worked under his absolutely boundless energy, we can say first-hand that he's a force to be reckoned with. Apparently the New York times thinks so as well.

The Sunday edition of the New York Times included this great article on the small change left over in the search space outside of Google. Well, small change if you can call a 1 billion dollar market cap "small change". According to one of the experts the NYT spoke with, "1 percent of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the United States in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of $105 million. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company."

We're keeping a close eye on Mahalo, and the rest of the search market that exists outside the Google-sphere.

The once fearless leader of Weblogs Inc has been working hard with his team to develop the Mahalo human based search engine. His team of professional surfers scowers the web searching for the best and most relevant information, without all of the spammy, or non important results.

It takes time to build out the pages, and his team has so far managed to build out an average of 500 pages per week. In an effort to increase the database of top level terms Mahalo supplies to the end user, they are asking for your help, and have started the Mahalo Greenhouse. The Greenhouse has been designed to be where part time talented guides can help to create results based on their specialties. It's open for anyone that wants to contribute, and yes, there is cash involved. (only for US residents however.) Submit an application and cross your fingers, this little part time gig will not only help people find the information they are searching for, but net people anywhere from $10-$15 per search result. Of course the search results submitted will be monitored and approved before it is added to the directory.

When human-powered search engine Mahalo launched in alpha earlier this month, comparisons to Google Search were inevitable. In reality, Mahalo is to Google like pie is to brussels sprouts. They're both food, but pie is much more fun to eat.

Mahalo is the brainchild of uber-entreprenuer Jason Calacanis (the founder of Weblogs, Inc. and, by extension, this blog) and could position itself to become a viable alternative to the stodgy-but-familiar Google behemoth. Though it's not ready for prime time just yet, we took a walk through the site and snagged a few screen shots along the way.