Just being unveiled at LeWeb3 in Paris is an overhaul of Mahalo, the human-powered search engine launched by Jason Calacanis in May.
Today's announcement: Mahalo has added extensive rating and profile features, reached 25,000 index pages and formally signed up to a Creative Commons licence to make its content easier to share.
Calacanis said the site had wanted to create search results pages for 10,000 subjects by the end of the year but has more than doubled that. Mahalo now employs 60 full-time staff, he said, as well as 400 paid contributors paid around $15 for each search term results page they write and $5 for each page they quality control.
Calacanis said he had listened to criticism that the site wasn't 'web 2.0' enough because it didn't allow pages to be edited, but also that he wanted that kind of interaction to evolve over time and not be a Wikipedia-style free-for-all. The 'Mahalo Social' features add a social layer to the site with profile pages that openly show the contributions and efforts of each user.
Contributor profile page
Contributors can now suggest links to information and relevant news that can be added to search results pages.
Suggest a link
"We don't want to be as sophisticated as Facebook, but start to build trust relationships with contributors. On Digg, you know the people who are accepted but you don't know who is being banned or why."
Explaining why some suggestions have been blocked is a first he said, probably because it is very time-consuming. But that is a very necessary part of being open and transparent in your editing.
"There's a mentality in Silicon Valley and the tech world that everyone is equal and that the idea of ranking is not good. But we believe our individual editors can make better pages. The wisdom of the crowds is so easily gained," said Calacanis, presumably recognising that at the same time, Mahalo is built by tapping the wisdom of those same crowds. But he's thinking of search-engine optimisation firms and marketeers that 'game' Digg and search sites - Mahalo cannot be played, he said.
Calacanis was told by one SEO guy, he said, that he had found a way to game Mahalo - by making pages that are full of great content and really useful. "We're directing good behaviour," said Calacanis, adding that site owners also have a path of recourse if they aren't happy with results on Mahalo - unlike Yahoo and Google.
Making pages up-dateable and open to improvement will add to the long-term traffic building up on the site, he said. Each page retains one editor responsible for overseeing and moderating all those suggestions to keep the quality high; Calacanis said that a lack of that kind of co-ordination is another element that makes Wikipedia unreliable.
Mahalo pages now have RSS and XML feeds throughout which means its content can be used non-commercially on other sites through standard Creative Commons terms. Mahalo had 1.8 million unique users each month, around 65% of those in the US. Calacanis said he's not concerned about making the site mainstream because it doesn't have to be mainstream to be a good business.
I asked about revenues, and whether Mahalo might look at advertising targeted around its content, but Calacanis was dismissive: "Mahalo doesn't need to make money. Having social features like MySpace and Facebook is just a way of building pages."
I'm increasingly intrigued by Mahalo, not least because it seems counter-intuitive to return to a human-edited version of the web when we have become so reliant on those clever algorithms to help process the web for us. But when there are so many sites competing for our time, it seems a key differentiator is the personality, credibility and reliability that a layer of human editing and interpretation adds to our experience.
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