Mahalo - The Other Search Engine

Whilst trawling the internet I recently discovered a search engine I had never heard

of before and they seem to operate very differently from their competitors. Please feel free to skip to the next paragraph if you already know how search engines work, but for everyone else... Search engines use crawlers to constantly search the internet for new and updated content and then automatically enter it all into the engines database. Then whenever a user has a query this database is searched and the result deemed to be the most suitable are presented to the searcher.

The relatively new search engine Mahalo (Hawaiian for 'Thank-You') puts a spin on proceedings by pitching itself as a human powered search engine. Of course this doesn't mean that whenever you perform a search that humans immediately start searching the net for relevant material, but rather that contributors create their own results pages which are then returned when a specific search is performed. The idea verges on the ridiculous but does certainly hold some merit.

The downside of course being humans simply can't possibly work as fast as the crawlers that traditional search engines like Google use; the machines running these crawlers are online all day every day and can make note of every detail on a whole website in a matter of seconds. A human based search engine is always going to be comparatively out of date and limited in terms the amount of material that can be catalogued.

As I said, there are advantages but these can only really be appreciated by using it. Head to www.mahalo.com and type in a phrase that interests you - I remained topical and typed in 'Gordon Brown' since he appears to be hitting the headlines a fair bit at the moment. Mahalo immediately returned to me a quick overview on the man, a photo, twelve fast facts and a large number of vetted websites with useful information which have been split in to a number of useful categories such as 'recent news', 'Brown Blair Changeover' and 'Controversies'. In contrast, if you type the same in to Google it immediately returns 13,000,000 results for pages which mention the words Gordon or Brown; of course the most relevant sites are at the top but it still is a little more cumbersome to navigate.

It is also fairly safe to say that humans are better equipped to work out what other humans will find interesting and as such you won't find links to any pages that contain adult content, hate speech, spam, intrusive advertising, malicious material and even sites written with a poor grasp of the English language.

The quantity of content available is rather unimpressive at present; of my native Paignton gave no results as did the entire county of Devon (rather worryingly). However as the site is just over a year old and there is much information to be catalogued and work to be done. I fear that unless there is a serious amount of manpower that any existing results could also soon become stale and irrelevant.

Mahalo will never be able to compete with the likes of Google in terms of the sheer scope and depth of results but to compare the two against each other would be missing the point. Mahalo isn't trying to be Google; it is a humanly edited search engine which is being built to provide relevant, human picked material for popular subjects. Google on the other hand is a vast machine driven database of over 100,000,000 websites which is added to every second of every day. They both have their purpose, and as such would hope that there is room for them both to peacefully co-exist.

by: Chris Holgate

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