According to a scoop by Sean Percival at Lalawag, Jason Calacanis’s Mahalo is set to undergo a major revision change some time today, and no be “the human powered search engine.”
Sometime Tuesday Jason will reveal “Mahalo 2.0,” a complete overhaul of the site based heavily on aggregated content. It seems Mahalo’s biggest strength, the humans themselves, were also its biggest weakness. After all, humans are both expensive and troublesome. Content scrapers, however, never complain and never tire–they simply aggregate.
The narrative of Mahalo has changed a number of times since the company’s inception, something I’ve followed with some personal interest and closeness. It started out as a human-powered way to defeat the mighty Google.
At some point along the way, the usefulness of the service stopped resembling a straight search engine’s and started more closely following the usage patterns of crowd-sourced news like Nowpublic.
Part of the reason Mahalo has failed to achieve much excitement is that there’s generally a lack of excitement around search tools. Perhaps it’s because we live in a world now where we can’t imagine anything unseating Google as the king of search, or perhaps it’s because online searching has become so utilitarian, talking about it is about like talking about your door knob or your coffee maker. Sure, there are some cool variations on the theme, but at the end of the day, a door knob is a door knob.
With Mahalo re-positioning itself as a crowdsourced aggregation point for what’s going on in the real-time web and a place to have your questions instantly and exhaustively answered isn’t a bad direction for Mahalo to take, and one that will ultimately end up benefiting them as they continue to try to grow past a simple venture funded company.
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