Can Mahalo stop you using Google?
Updated on 15 June 2007
The man with a hand in the world's most popular blog is back with a Google-busting plan. Is he mad?
If you're looking for something on the internet, it's odds on you use the Google search engine.
The service has proved essential for many people wanting to find things on the web, and of course Google makes billions of dollars off the back of it.
But Jason Calacanis thinks human beings can do it better - and he's set up a rival search engine, Mahalo.com. Its top results are written by human beings, so he says they're better - and more relevant - than Google.
Lots of other people have taken on Google and failed, of course - but he has a better track record than most on the web.
His previous company, Weblogs.com publishes the world's most popular blog - Engadget.
He told the Morning Report's Ben King how Mahalo works:
Jason Calacanis: Mahalo is a human-powered search engine and the term Mahalo is a Hawaiian term. It means to appreciate, or thank you.
Our site is much different than Google because Google uses machines to index the web. The machines go out and take everything and index everything, and that includes bad stuff and spam.
We have humans look at Google or other search engines and sites and then organise that information. So imagine a human using Google for four or five hours on a search.
If you're looking for a search on "Paris, hotel", we have a human do that search for three or four or five hours and then give you results.
It's obviously a lot better because humans are picking up where the machines left off. And so it's not quite man versus machines - it's man with machines versus machines alone. The search results come out five or 10 times better than Google because there's no spam in them and they're much more organised.
Ben King: What are the searches where this works best?
Jason Calacanis: Any search where there's a lot of information available on the internet and where there's a lot of money at stake.
For example travel, cars and health. Stuff like that where there are a lot of people out there trying to intercept you on your way to information and get you to click on a couple of things because they make money per click.
Or someone trying to get you to buy a hotel room through them instead of the official site. In those areas that's where Google and Yahoo fail the most, and that's where we succeed the most because a human can tell if something is spam or not instantly.
Ben King: Google and Yahoo make their money by interfering with your journey to your information and charging money. How will Mahalo make its money?
Jason Calacanis: We've got a good line up of investors and we're going to work on this for five or six years. We probably won't try to make money in the first year or two, we'll just try to make a great search engine. However, after that we'll have clearly-labelled text-based advertising on the side, like Google.
Ben King: Google has more than 50 per cent of the market now. Lots of people have taken them on and failed in the past, what makes you think that your experience will be any different?
Jason Calacanis: We're not trying to beat Google, that's one of the key differences. If we don't have a search result, which is maybe 50 per cent or two thirds of the time, then we'll give you over to Google. But for the instances where we do have a hit like for the search "Paris, hotels", or a certain type of automobile, the iPhone or the iPod, we're a lot better than Google or Yahoo or Ask.
'It's a lot better because humans are picking up where the machines left off. It's not quite man versus machines - it's man with machines versus machines alone.'Jason Calacanis, Mahalo
We think that's going to lead customers to us for very specific types of searches on health and products and the like. Then for what's known in the industry as longtail searches, that's very niche stuff like the person you went to college or university with, we'll give those to Google.
And incidentally when we give them to Google we're going to split the revenue, because Google has a programme to do that. We're going to make a lot of money from those searches.
One of the interesting things about the search base is that it's become so large and advertisers love it so much that one per cent of the search market is worth a billion dollars, so you really don't need to have more than a couple of percentage points to have a huge business.
