I wouldn’t be so sure that if Google introduced a similar human edited engine it would take off.

Firstly you only need to look to Google video to see that inertia doesn’t always work.

Plus the sheer hours and people working on the algo, i don’t think they’d be keen with some researcher tweaking the results…

I’m not convinced Mahalo will work, but I still think it’s an interesting project.

1. near infinite resources

2 (The biggest one) inertia.

If Google decided that it needed to get human editors, it will, and plenty of them to start at the most searched for keywords, and work their way down, cleaning it up as they go along.

The inertia means that they will be fine until they plug this gap, because so many people don’t even try other search engines.

This new search engine, they have gone for the popular vote, and it takes time to huma edit many pages, that is why there is so little in the way of pages.

How about this for an idea: The wiki-engine where users modify the search engine rankings based on their experiences.

Dario :: Bushidoblog.com

If it will indeed work the way you imply, with the suggestion of links those SEOs working on good sites might do quite well. However I wouldn’t want to be the guide mortgages, loans or poker!

The results we’ve done so far are about 60-70% complete. We plan on letting the public help us finish them. For example, if you look at the Apple, iPhone, or Twitter search result pages you’ll see that people are putting in some great links–links that we will move from the “recommended” box and into the main search result.

In terms of scale I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Since we show Google when we don’t have a result you lose noting when you search Mahalo, and if we have a hit you get a HUGE pay off.

Right now we only have 4,000 pages, but at some point you’ll be able to add a zero or two to that number and experience something much, much different. When that happens a lot of the SEO hate will die down.

In fact, we are the best thing to ever happen to SEO firms because we will listen to them. Google, Ask, Yahoo, and MSN will not talk to an SEO or their client about the search results for a term, but our Guides will. In fact, we’re hoping SEOs come to us with their best clients and links because we can quickly tell if they should be included. If they are not valuable enough our Guides will tell the SEO/client why and give them tips on how to make their site competitive enough with the other links on the page.

In a way I think SEOs might learn to love Mahalo because they can’t stop wasting their time trying to game Google and spend their time making better sites that help people–and isn’t that the most important thing at the end of the day?

Mahalo for the feedback and please keep it coming!

Jason

Good work on the article and laying out the points, the thing they really need to work on is pushing out more of their own results.

http://www.google.com/search?q=mahalo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.m ozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

but flickr results,

blog results,

links to the israel palestine conflict,

links to news stories about him in main stream press

brief biog etc

not bad for one just one page, a great oversight in one place, more links than wiki, more variety than google.

Not perfect but can def see uses…

In all but one search the Wikipedia entry on the same subject is listed in the top 7 results. Why go to Mahalo? It would be quicker to go to Wikipedia directly and search there.

I didn’t see any finely hand-crafted results as the site claims. What I saw was links to a small subset of the most popular sites online. Do we need a pseudo search engine to tell us how to get to the Wikipedia or to IMBD or to Yahoo?