mahalo is the first result, there are other very popular queries where mahalo is on the first page. So they get a bunch of relevant clicks and then they put ads on those pages so surely they must be making decent money.
I doubt they make enough money to cover all of their employees but eventually they can just fire all of their employees and live off of the content revenue for a few years or sell the site to somebody who will.
That's a great how to article. Our mission at Mahalo, since not everyone here has spent 20 minutes having coffee with me (yet) is the following: "to help people find information they can trust."
We are testing different ways of doing this including:
1. hand crafter search results with content
2. a knowledge exchange (Mahalo Answers)
3. how to articles
4. (coming april 10th)
5. (coming September 15th)
The real goal of Mahalo is to build a service that combines the three most important services on the internet: content, search and knowledge exchange.
This page has nice wikipedia/About.com style content on the left, search results and Q&A on the right.
If a normal person (i.e. not a ycombinator/Techcrunch50/Scoble type) comes to a page like this they have a really nice spam-free experience.
We know this because we actually have a lab at Mahalo where we study human behavior on the web. If any of you would like to see this here is a video from before we launched:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoehBwTAH5Y
In these studies we found that folks LOVES our model.
I like that service - I've used Mahalo several times - and generally the idea of aggregation is one that I think can serve a better purpose. However, I've noticed that Mahalo has been shifting farther and farther away from its original beautiful aesthetic. Now your pages look crammed rather than pleasing.
I think that's a slightly cynical view. While I can certainly appreciate and relate to the distaste for SEM/SEO gaming, their article for how to play the guitar is a very newb-friendly summary and a lot better than 90% of the sites out there. Look at the top results, it speaks for itself.
A successful startup does not always rely on unique and innovative technology, the execution of a consumer "brand experience" can be as equally important. In this case, their IP is human-driven. Google's algorithm is nice but it's not AI yet.
To me, Mahalo completes the yin-yang of search. The concept is not new, human-filtering was around in the 90-00's. Popular algorithms and directories have come and gone. Mahalo is doing the best job of it today.
mahalo is the first result, there are other very popular queries where mahalo is on the first page. So they get a bunch of relevant clicks and then they put ads on those pages so surely they must be making decent money.
I doubt they make enough money to cover all of their employees but eventually they can just fire all of their employees and live off of the content revenue for a few years or sell the site to somebody who will.