People Search Digest

Mahalo! You’re welcome! Mahalo is not only the Hawaiian word for thank you, but it is also the first ever human-powered search engine. It’s unique because it creates organized, comprehensive, and spam-free search results. The Mahalo team has dedicated time and energy to finding the best links for search terms, so you don’t have to. With most traditional search engines, it can be tough to find relevant results within an unorganized list full of extraneous content. Mahalo search results show sites that are relevant based on the context of the page, rather than the domain name, which can often times be misleading.

The results contain everything you need to know about a topic, and it’s all organized into easy to read sections. For example, a travel page for a particular city would be broken down into basics (weather, current events, maps, history, etc.), and then travel tips (flights, hotels, restaurants, shopping, transportation, etc.). Many of the great links that Mahalo provides are hard to find on Google, and Mahalo will never give you result containing spam, mediocre content, or deceptive sites. Believe it or not, they have real humans filtering out all those annoying sites that are just trying to sell you something.

Mahalo is also very interactive, with each result has containing a form to recommend a link, and a message board to discuss topics. If can’t find something you are looking for, Mahalo encourages you to submit a request form for a particular page to be written. Or, if you’re really feeling ambitious, they offer the Mahalo Greenhouse—a place where users can write their own pages. However, these pages must be very well written and meet the high Mahalo standards, as they are carefully reviewed by real people. If a page is accepted to be published on Mahalo, the author will be compensated anywhere from $10-$15 for each page published.

Just a couple weeks ago, Mahalo added a Firefox extension called “Mahalo Follow”, which allows you to put Mahalo right into your tool bar for your convenience. Everytime you search with your regular search engine, the Mahalo results page will appear right next to the results page of your current search engine, so you can compare. It’s a great way to use Mahalo without committing to it as your main search engine. This tool is a great asset for anyyone, but will be especially helpful for college students and other people who perform heavy online searches. So mahalo, Mahalo for humanizing search engines!