Wrapping my head around Mahalo as "search"

[Image: mahalo logo]For a while now I’ve been trying to get myself conceptually comfortable with Mahalo as a “search engine.” I’ve been back and forth in my head about what exactly Mahalo is, because it doesn’t feel like search to me, at least not architecturally.

Mahalo is search in the sense that, if I want to go online and find information about Halo 3, it’s an awesome resource. Certainly less cluttered than any other search engine out there (although I think the “also try…“‘s should be lower on the page).

But fundamentally Mahalo is a content directory. These are human-generated that fall into “categories” or search terms that are determined by other people. It still falls prey, in a certain silly way, to the problem of the Target down the street: if I don’t know what aisle the dish soap is, I can’t find it.

In practice this hasn’t really been a problem for me. Mahalo is also pretty good about saying “you can also try…” and I asked Jason about it on twitter, and he explained:

we do redirect common searches to SERPs (i.e. hotels in paris, paris lodging, hotels paris, etc. should all go to paris hotels)

But in theory, if I don’t know the right search term on Mahalo, I might not be able to find it.

That said, I think it’s the kind of site that will get non-technical people interested in the kind of content that’s now all over the internet (but not easy to get to). I just can’t get myself to call Mahalo “search.” Especially with all they’re “How To” pages (AWESOME content --- not really search).

I wonder how much mahalo traffic starts at Google vs. at Mahalo.com?