I just saw a very very interesting interview with Jason Calacanis where he explains why Mahalo is going to be a success in the next 5 years and why there was need for such a service. I must say he has some good points that I really enjoyed hearing.

The first thing I agree with, is that the search results we see these days on Google, Yahoo!, MSN or Ask are filled with websites designed for the spiders instead of the visitors. It’s the era of SEO and everyone needs to get there building link farms or other black methods, that made some of the search results look like a garbage dump. We polluted the internet by not focusing on quality. Agreed.

For those of you that didn’t know Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine that is supposed to be “as big as Google” (yes I think you’ve gone mad) in the next 5 years. The difference between Mahalo and the other spider dependent search engines is that they will not have any spam inside because everything gets through a hand.

The interview however has some very interesting ideas about promotion, marketing and how to create a rock solid company to compete with the big guys.

My Mahalo Conclusion

• These guys (40 people so far) are going after 25-30% of the queries (top keywords of the long tail) which is pretty decent. But I am not very fond of how their results look like. I agree the idea of doing it manually gives some sort of “weight” but I did a search for Paris Hotels because that was the guys example throughout the interview. For a traveler like me, that looks for a hotel in Paris the most interesting things to see would be : average price to see if I can afford it, area (he has Google Map) and some reviews.

• I really like the design.

• I fear that in the next few years, when they will grow, there will be people willing to pay to get a hotel up there in the list. I am not sure if they will be able to say no to money when the offer will pop in.

• Last thing is that I don’t think 5 years is enough to cover the 10-15 percent of the queries people run these days. Either hire 10 times more the people they have now, or move the deadline from 5 to 10 years.

I don’t want people to think I am against the idea because I am not. I really believe in it, but just not the way they are doing it now. Surely along the way their experience will speak for themselves and things will improve.