As part of our ongoing series of posts about how to use Splashtop to its full advantage, I wanted to tell you about Mahalo.
Mahalo is a “human-powered search engine” that competes with traditional algorithm based search engines like Google and Yahoo!. The theory behind Mahalo (as I understand it) is that while Google may return lots of relevant keyword results, it is also cluttered with advertisements and spam. Mahalo seeks to avoid spammy results by having actual human people submit and review results for a given search term to make sure they are truly relevant and useful.
If you think that sounds labor intensive, you’re right. But users can sign up for an account and submit results they think make sense; other users vote on the relevance, making it a a very social, user-driven experience. Mahalo was started by internet mainstay Jason Calacanis - we actually met Jason at Blog Haus during this year’s CES in Las Vegas.
Comscore shows that their popularity and traffic is skyrocketing - they have over 2 million monthly page-views now. From their own “about us” page:
We focus on the areas where traditional search engines struggle
Search results for certain categories, such as products, travel, cars, and health, are cluttered with people selling things, making it difficult to find great information on those topics. We focus on those topics and provide organized results that offer great links for every type of info you could need.
My own experience is that for very generic searches Mahalo has lots of results, most of which are strongly relevant. For very specific or esoteric search terms there may not much in the way of Mahalo results, but they will still display Google results, or returns from other search engines.
Another very worthwhile feature of Mahalo is Mahalo Daily, a video blog hosted by internet personality Veronica Belmont. Mahalo Daily videos are usually tech-related and very topical. They’re also pretty fun. Here’s todays:
Splashtop, as you know, allows you to instantly boot up your computer and access the internet. Our full-featured Splashtop browser will let you make use of the whole variety of rich internet applications available out there in the ether. Mahalo is one such, and well worth visiting.
