Mar 20 2008
Mahalo Commits to SEO Customer Service and Gets Social
If there is one guy there is buzz around in the online industry right now, it’s Jason Calacanis, CEO of human powered search engine Mahalo.
I have to admit, everytime Mahalo comes up in a conversation, I think to myself, “where the hell does this guy think he’s going to go with this? Does he think he can really compete with Google, Yahoo, etc. Are those really his intentions?”
After hearing him speak yesterday at SES New York, I have a whole new outlook on Mahalo. I don’t think its trying to compete against any search engines, I think it will provide a new type of search for searchers.
It is DMOZ 2.0. It is a complex directory that will, what I think, become not a replacement for Google, but a new hub and authority directory that will be spam free. He announced very cool things that we will see out of Mahalo.
SEO WILL BE TRANSPARENT. Mahalo will provide customer service to SEOs to answer why you’re site isn’t ranking, ranking worse than other sites, etc.
Mahalo is aiming at creating an engine/directory of semantic relationships between people and objects. Mahalo will in fact be a social hub for search, making search a lot more personal in terms of what your “friends” on Mahalo think.

Jason stated the future of search if part machine, part human, and part social. Mahalo has some VERY interesting tools (social hub for submitting links) I never saw until yesterday so I really suggest you check it out and play around with it. It also seems like a place where you can make some money on the side by taking on accepting projects (making pages) for the directory.
















