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'Thus far Mahalo has generally received strong marks from reviewers. Michael Arrington writes: "Mahalo is a search engine, and will join Powerset as the more interesting new engines to launch in 2007." Rafe Needleman at WebWare writes "It looks like a very useful service." But if this wasn't Jason Calacanis' company and if Seqouia and News Corp. were not in, a true blind taste, we have to believe they would have panned Mahalo and never gone back.' I don't have much to add to that. Mahalo reminds First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman of Magellan, a human-edited search engine that launched in 1995.
Reading about the 40 Mahalo editors that are responsible for those 10,000 search results pages took me back to a painful time in my own life. After doing a stint at publisher Miller Freeman, I found myself looking for a job in San Francisco in January 1999. While talking to prospective employers, I saw an advertisment for an Internet search company seeking editors. I'd done some research on the burgeoning search market and knew it was growing. And I figured as a reporter, a job as an editor --even if it was at a technology company-- would be a step up. I showed up for the company's "tryouts" on a rainy evening that President Clinton was giving his State of the Union address. The company interviewers asked some questions about search and organizing information. I did well enough to get an offer. So, a few weeks later, I showed up for my first day of training at the assigned time in the afternoon. I was seated in the middle of an enormous open room with nothing in it but hundreds of tables, computers and "editors". It looked like a post-modern vision of Dickensian England. The draft was persistent and the work was inane. I was trained on a computer to search for a specific topic on the web and assign it the appropriate classification in the company's index. I did that for a few hours until training ceased. The next morning, I got an offer from The Deal, which I gladly accepted. I didn't show up for "training" the next day or the day after that. That company, LookSmart, went on to a successful IPO but quickly ran into trouble. Its human edited search results didn't catch on against stronger algorithmic based results. Looksmart's market capitalization today is $75 million. That's probably not too much more than Mahalo's post-money value in its latest round of funding.
To more on Mahalo, see: Technorati tags: mahalo, looksmart, magellan, vcventure+capital
Comments
From: Ross Bradley,
Yes, Looksmart's market capitalization today closed @ a little over $78 million. But many feel that it won't stay down at this level for too much longer. Luck may change in it's partnering of Co's like Marchex, REED Publishing and Network Solutions. There does appear to be a real Global effort in gathering advertisers by these Co's and their many hundreds of thousands of sites, may even require suitable (related) content very shortly. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/technology/28ecom.html?ref=business Mahalo, with it's human-editors may just find a "niche" in this regard. Who knows? Best you check it all out for yourself. Cheers!
Posted on:
May 31, 2007 6:38 PM
From: Jason,
Thanks for the feedback. For a moment I would ask you to put aside if it is possible and ask "will it help?" To test this do a search for Paris Hotels or Flatpanel TV or LCD TV on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Then compare those results to our results. We are much better because we are a) more organized, b) we have no spam, and c) we are more efficient with more links per 100pixels. Don't worry about the business model--I can figure that part out. :-) Mahalo for the feedback! Keep it coming and let me know what you think of the side by side search. best jason
Posted on:
May 31, 2007 7:00 PM
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LookSmart should have kept Zeal after all. Beefed it up and put it to good use.
Who knows what they are up to now. I do do know one thing, their market cap makes the stock inviting!