Mahalo is Hawaiian for Thank You

So Google is looking to buy Digg, and for people in the know, that prospect is simultaneously exciting, inevitable, hilarious, and terrifying.  I’m feeling ambivalent toward the approaching deal myself, in spite of my growing chagrin over Google’s seeming agenda to buy everything on the internet.  It’s unnerving, and what’s it going to take for them to buy me?  I’m willing to sell, just give me a call guys.  Brin and Page, I am looking in your direction.

Okay, now I’m going to throw an insane idea out here, something even I can barely accept as anything short of ludicrous: searching without Google.

I know!  These words coming out of a Google fanboy, I know.  It shouldn’t be, but there it is.  I remember back in the days before Googling was de rigueur, when Yahoo search was seen as useful, things like Alta Vista and Teoma existed, and Ask Jeeves was treated like a legitimate enterprise.  These were dark times.  As of now, there simply isn’t another search engine that matters.  People might use Live search by accident in their IE7 toolbars, or use Yahoo search because it’s their homepage for some arcane reason, but once something becomes synonymous with whatever it is that it is to the point of actually replacing the technical term in day to day language, it’s entrenched forever.  See also Kleenex and iPods.

Things might be shifting though, something acknowledged even by Google in its Digg purchase.  Web 2.0, i.e. socializing everything, making it collaborative, and putting profiles in everything, is everywhere.  Nothing’s escaping its grasp, but Google seems to be having a perceptibly ham-handed time of it picking up on this trend.  Lively sucks, it takes a million years to load anything even on a solid connection, it’s weird looking, and there isn’t enough content.  Knol just launched, but the idea of a Wikipedia killer is even more perverse than that of a Google killer, and the notion that Google will start producing content of its own is going to mix up a lot of users.  Blogger is nearly 75% spam.  The company has a well-earned monopoly on search, ads, and web office suites, but its entries into other arenas haven’t been going so well.  Remember Froogle?

Enter the age of people-driven search, the technology that could, potentially, unseat Google as the king of the internet.

Mahalo seems to be the most famous and appealing example, and I’ve developed a huge crush on it.  The gist of it is, every search result page is crafted by users, and Mahalo’s engine returns the pages to you in order of their popularity.  If a term doesn’t have a page made yet, users get indexed results from Google, Ask.com, Yahoo search, and more, with the option for any registered user to actually put together and collaborate on all search results pages.  Keeping things clean and relevant (since Mahalo boasts about never linking you to spam or mediocre content) seems to involve a Wikipedia style mishmash of review and community honor system: if someone finds a spam result, they can easily fix it, and it seems to work well.

What impressed me most about the service is that search pages can and do become infinitely richer resources than any other search engine’s ubiquitous stark list of links.  Mahalo sets aside easy to edit areas for adding quick descriptions of the topic of a search, present relevant media like videos and images, and share the page via email or any of the standard social networks. Results are always relevant, voted up in a Digg-like system so that only the most poignant links are displayed, potentially liberating users from the need for hair-ripping pidgin efforts of squeezing useful info out of Google.  It breaks these results into Mahalo’s top 7 and User Recommended Links, I’m sure so that spam can be kept to a minimum, but to be honest, how often does one have to go further than 7 or so links into a search before they either find what they’re looking for or decide their search is no good and start over?

All Mahalo’s added richness has the potential to get very muddled and inaccurate very quickly, but the searches I’ve done turned back extremely slick and informative, a sort of synthesis of search engine, Digg, and Wikipedia in an attractive format.  Quite a few of the searches I performed had no results, and I’m having a tough time getting the Create A New Page function to cooperate with me, but the system is still in beta.  I’m a fan at this point, I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Scour is offering a similar experience to Mahalo, if stripped down to the essentials, and offering an incredibly tempting though difficult to acquire payment scheme for ones participation.  Basically, once you rack up 6,500 points on the site, through searching, voting, commenting and the like, you can cash in for a $25 Visa gift certificate.  Sounds good to me.  The thing that news sites aren’t mentioning is that you’re capped at 4 points per search you make, which means you need to make 1,650 searches and participate in each in order to get your gift.  I only do 5-10 web searches a day on those days when I’m at a computer all of the time, so a best case scenario for me getting the prize is using Scour every day for 165 days.  I’m not so enticed, though this won’t prevent me from bookmarking the ridiculous thing.

Aha.  Turns out Mahalo’s got a similar project called Mahalo Greenhouse that alledgedly pays by search page created.  Pardon me while I try to make some thoroughly undeserved cash.