I’ll have to admit, when I first heard about Mahalo courtesy of Jason Calacanis’ blog, I was a bit skeptical and mentally put Mahalo low on my list of launches to be excited about. While the idea of a “human powered search engine” has always been intriguing to everyone in the tech industry due to the amount of SPAM and SEO exploitation in Google/Yahoo!/MSN, this latest execution stunk a little of pre-Web 2.0 bubble bursting material.

Fast forward a few months (the Alpha for Mahalo was released in May 2007) and while researching and composing an article on car insurance, I ended up at Mahalo to see the types of results I would get. The positive experience (the results were MUCH better than Google’s) was so interesting, I added some praise to the article for Mahalo and began to think that Mahalo may be a better search site for terms like “car insurance” where consumer education and research is just as important as the commercial vendors.

Which brings me to this article about popular search terms and Mahalo. The first issue I had to tackle was Mahalo’s lack of support for “adult themed” searches (read Jason’s comments on the topic). Searches for very common and broad keywords like “sex” and “ass” turned up absolutely nothing which means the popular keyword list is cut almost in half. This obviously is a very popular market that Mahalo is skirting around and I can see the reasoning behind it, although they are leaving out a huge opportunity in doing so. A more savvy strategy would be to embrace the adult market and provide the appropriate safe guards (something Google is unable or unwilling to do).

My focus then for this article is going to be other terms in the top 300 surge report I get weekly from WordTracker. This report shows the top 200 most commonly searched for phrases in the last 48 hours.

These searches represent non adult terms in the 300-250 most popular range.

1. Term: three days grace Result: Nothing
The grade would be lower but it seems this is a newish band and on the “surge” list for a reason.
Grade D

2. Term: expedia Result: Good
Full custom results, with information and links about the company and competitors.
Grade A

3. Term: short haircut Result: Nothing
Apparently people like to research new hairdos online, unfortunately Mahalo doesn’t help them in this regard.
Grade D-

4. Term: bank of america Result: Good
Good coverage like Expedia, except even more robust with a financial graph and more links.
Grade A+

5. Term: music Result: Okay
This results was interesting, instead of a typical results page I got a huge list of sub categories with breakdowns for each genre. Still, there’s no other content besides this.
Grade B-

6. Term: game boy cheats Result: Nothing
Amazing no one has gotten on this term already, gaming is one of the largest uses of the Internet and it’s keyword variations dominate search phrase inventories.
Grade F

7. Term: meaning of names Result: Nothing
Another common search engine term, people love looking up name “meanings”
Grade F

8. Term: bratz Result: Good
Good results, plenty of information links.
Grade A+

9. Term: linux Result: Good
Another home run, the Linux results are plentiful and quality.
Grade A+

10. Term: free online games Result: Nothing
Another gaming related keyword with no results, I’ll skip the future gaming keywords as I don’t expect results.
Grade F

11. Term: google earth Result: Nothing
Nothing from Mahalo Although the default Google results are just what people will need.
Grade C

12. Term: sunrocket Result: Nothing
This was a little surprising (as they’ve been around since 2004) but I’ll grade it fair as it appears sunrocket is new to the list.
Grade C-

13. Term: pictures of cats Result: Nothing
If I had a grade lower than F- I would hand it out here. Come on… no results for pictures of cats?!?! Shame.
Grade F-

14. Term: wwe Result: Good
Good results, plenty of information about this popular sport/attraction.
Grade A+

15. Term: bleach Result: Good
Surprisingly good results for such a boring term.
Grade A

16. Term: daniel radcliffe Result: Good
Another hit for Mahalo, the results are great here.
Grade A+

17. Term: vida guerra Result: Nothing
Vida is borderline “adult” material as she’s famous for mostly her body part(s). But I would expect to see some results as she’s managed to exploit her initial Internet celebrity into a somewhat legit career. Curiously “paris hilton” has good results and one could argue she’s more of an “adult” star then anything else.
Grade B-

18. Term: metallica Result: Good
Ah yes, the original RIAA piracy poster boys enjoy good results at Mahalo.
Grade A+

19. Term: dog Result: Good
The results are very complete and offer many categories of links and information for dog lovers and researchers as well as consumers.
Grade A+

Final Conclusion:

The final verdict is a bit mixed. There are plenty of A’s on the report card above but also plenty of F’s. All of which shows that the staff at Mahalo still has a lot of work to do. If Jim Lanzone is to be believed and 60% of all searches are unique and new, Mahalo might have a never ending battle ahead of them that they cannot win.

However, if Mahalo positions themselves as Wikipedia for search and the web community embraces them (and contributes) they could be one of the late Web 2.0 success stories.