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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Search engine handcrafts listings

By Alex Pham
Los Angeles Times

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Trying to chip away at Google Inc.'s Web search empire, a new Santa Monica company is pitting human against machine.

While Google has thousands of computers crunching complex algorithms to sift through the Web, Mahalo Inc. employs about 40 people to handcraft search results. The idea is to add a human touch to the highly automated process of helping people find what they're looking for online.

"Google indexes the world's information," Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis said. "We're curating the world's information."

Calacanis, a seasoned entrepreneur who has sold companies to AOL and Dow Jones, knows that it's silly to try to unseat Google. Instead, he wants to siphon a small but lucrative part of the $6.8 billion U.S. search market that Google dominates, by providing answers to only the most popular queries, such as "Paris hotels" and "flat panel TV."

Mahalo, named for the Hawaiian word for "thank you," has powerful financial backers, including News Corp., CBS Corp. and Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture company that backed the likes of Google and Yahoo Inc. The company plans to make money through online ads.

Working out of a former factory, Mahalo's "guides" have assembled pages for more than 4,000 search terms they think people most want. They aim to complete 10,000 by the end of the year.

That's a far cry from Google, which indexes billions of Web pages to return an immense number of results to queries as wide-ranging as "Norwegian wood instrument" and "wayward whales" — terms that were not covered by Mahalo's guides as of today, when the company launched an early version of its service. For results it doesn't offer, Mahalo links to the relevant answers on Google.

The reliance on people to organize the Web harkens back to the early to mid-1990s, when Yahoo and other companies had employees sift through Web pages and assemble them into directories, said David Hallerman, an analyst with EMarketer Inc. But the sheer size and constantly changing nature of the Web quickly made computers better suited for that task.

Ask.com, the search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves, for years tried using hundreds of editors to compile results but abandoned that approach in favor of computer code.

"We moved away from that specifically because we couldn't be accurate enough and comprehensive enough," Ask.com chief executive Jim Lanzone said. "Running a search engine is a very humbling experience because you realize very quickly how hard it is to do well."

The efforts of some commercial Web sites to boost their rankings by outsmarting search engines has polluted some results, making them less useful, said James Lamberti, senior vice president of ComScore Inc. That creates an opportunity for companies that can promise a better experience.

Humans are harder to fool, said Danny Sullivan, editor of industry site www.SearchEngineLand.com.

Still, analysts said the human factor that Mahalo counts as its greatest asset might turn out to be its biggest limitation. "Will the human beings be able to keep up with everything?" Sullivan said.

Calacanis said Mahalo doesn't have to keep up with everything — just the things that most interest people.

"It will take some time to complete, but when it's done, it will be glorious," he said. "Until then, we invite people to compare our results with any search engine out there. For results that we do have, they're going to be five to 10 times better because humans have thought about them."