People Search Digest

It looks like social networks are the must-have of this holiday season. Following suit with many “web 2.0″ sites, wiki-based search engine Mahalo launched a new social networking feature on December 12 at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. If you’ll recall from our earlier entry profiling Mahalo, it is a search engine that focuses on user link submissions and an editorial process to theoretically produce better search results than algorithm-only engines like Google and Yahoo!.

Since the engine relies on user submission to provide content for the results, Mahalo already pays its users for their quality submissions. Now the site offers user profiles and other social networking features as an incentive for more users to submit more usable content. The high and mighty editors over at Mahalo get to decide if the submitted links for a specific search term should be included in the results. If the content is accepted, then the user gets credit and a high score, but if it’s banned, the user’s score will decrease. All of these results will be displayed on the user’s profile, so active members will use more discretion when it comes to adding links, so their score will increase.

Right now, the service offers around 26,000 pages of results with another thousand or so being added each week. Their only current direct competition is Wiki, which seems to be carbon copying the social networking approach, in order to maximize their user participation. We’ll see if “making friends” increases the success of the human-powered search engine.