Jason Calacanis' new venture, Mahalo, has launched to mixed reviews. The human-edited search engine endeavors to offer users better results for the 10,000 most popular search terms, which account for 25% of all searches. Mahalo has raised money from Sequoia Capital and News Corp. The concept seems like a sound one that could eventually grab a small piece of the search market but the results so far are subpar. In giving the company the business, the Alarm:clock wrote:

'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:
Jason Calacanis
Danny Sullivan

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