Mahalo.com, the latest company from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, launched, with a stripped-down search engine designed to handle only the most popular requests in widely appealing categories.
Focused on areas such as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports — and filtered with the help of a team of 40 employees in Santa Monica, Calif. — the limited results are meant to avoid the spam and other junk results that clog up the other search engines. They aim to fulfill the Web’s most repeated requests.
By cherry-picking only the most popular 10,000 search terms, it can organize results in the form of a more organized, thoughtful list about your search term’s attributes.
The challenge here, though, is that dozens of other search engines have launched to tackle specialized search already, including shopping search engines, job search engines, travel engines and engines like Hakia that organize results in similar ways to Mahalo.
Moreover, there are other sites that provide real people to help assist in searches, such as ChaCha.com. Finally, Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success.
Geek gossip is (well - not from Truemors) Calacanis had ambitious plans for his video wikipedia, but had no idea he'd be this aggressive in funding Mahalo. From the various numbers floating around, our guess is that Calacanis is seeking up to $20m, at a valuation of up to $100m. The round would make Mahalo one of the most lavishly backed pre-launch sites since, um, Boo.com during the last bubble. (That didn't end well.)
Bubble? Telecom bubbles and blogs that talk… this week Sweetheart Lindsay sits down with Alan Levy, founder of BlogTalkRadio.
Focused on areas such as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports — and filtered with the help of a team of 40 employees in Santa Monica, Calif. — the limited results are meant to avoid the spam and other junk results that clog up the other search engines. They aim to fulfill the Web’s most repeated requests.
By cherry-picking only the most popular 10,000 search terms, it can organize results in the form of a more organized, thoughtful list about your search term’s attributes.
The challenge here, though, is that dozens of other search engines have launched to tackle specialized search already, including shopping search engines, job search engines, travel engines and engines like Hakia that organize results in similar ways to Mahalo.
Moreover, there are other sites that provide real people to help assist in searches, such as ChaCha.com. Finally, Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success.
Geek gossip is (well - not from Truemors) Calacanis had ambitious plans for his video wikipedia, but had no idea he'd be this aggressive in funding Mahalo. From the various numbers floating around, our guess is that Calacanis is seeking up to $20m, at a valuation of up to $100m. The round would make Mahalo one of the most lavishly backed pre-launch sites since, um, Boo.com during the last bubble. (That didn't end well.)
Bubble? Telecom bubbles and blogs that talk… this week Sweetheart Lindsay sits down with Alan Levy, founder of BlogTalkRadio.
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