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# Mahalo hopes many surfers are thankful for all the extra work
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/mahalo-hopes-many-surfers-are-thankful-for-all-the-extra-work/
- Published: 2007-07-11T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T02:15:28.000Z
- Author: Melody Hanatani
- Tags: Sports, Mid-City, #archive-import

*People power fuels search engine*

MID-CITY Whether it’s searching for Derek Jeter’s batting average or updates on the girl whose feet were severed on an amusement park ride in Kentucky, one local start-up is hoping to provide Internet users with only the best and most relevant information.

Founded by the former senior vice president of AOL, Mahalo is trying to make its mark in a search engine world dominated by Yahoo! and Google — marketing its product as Web searching with a personal touch.

“Anybody who has used Google has run into the problem of spam on Google or Yahoo! or any of the machine search engines,” said CEO Jason Calacanis, sitting in the new Mahalo headquarters at Ninth Street and Colorado Avenue.

On Monday, a spokesman for Google stated that “it’s becoming harder to spam Google with things like off-topic porn, mal-ware” and that the company is working to remove Web spam to improve their users’ Web searching experience. Representatives for Yahoo! did not respond to a request seeking comment.

Calacanis calls Mahalo — which means “thank you” in Hawaiian — the curator of the bevy of information made available by Google and Yahoo!, filtering through the millions of results from popular queries and providing users with the best 20 to 30 sites.

Whereas Google and Yahoo! search engines are powered by machines, all of the information on Mahalo is hand-picked by a human.

“Machines will do half the work and then humans can do half the work,” he said.

Calacanis had just sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL when he began laying the foundation for Mahalo from his Brentwood home, working with 20 researchers daily since January to build the product until the company found a permanent home in an office park on Colorado Avenue. Santa Monica also hosts regional offices for Google and Yahoo!, both of which are based in Northern California.

Since January,the now 40-member staff has created more than 6,000 pages — each representing anywhere from a dozen to two dozen searches. The goal is to employ 100 researchers by the end of the year and create 10,000 pages. Once Mahalo reaches 25,000 pages, which Calacanis estimates will occur sometime in 2008, the company will officially launch. The project is still in the “alpha” phase — the initial stage when the company is trying to receive feedback from the public. Once it hits the 10,000-page mark, the site will transition into “beta,” the product being about 80 to 90 percent complete. The site will be launched when the product is ready to go and users will be able to search for nearly every popular topic imaginable.

A ‘BILLION’ REASONS Anything or anyone that is popular at the moment, whether it be the movie “Transformers” or singer Rihanna, should eventually make it to the list of Mahalo search pages. For topics without a page on Mahalo, such as “rent control,” the site directs users to its “friends at Google.”

Each hand-crafted page contains the top seven relevant sites, issues related to the topic and quick facts.A page on cats includes links to The Cat Fanciers’ Association, links to cat food reviews and a blurb that the Persian cat has been the most popular breed in America since 1871.

The quickly growing staff at Mahalo spend hours surfing the Web, searching for the best of the best the Internet has to offer. In assessing whether a site is legitimate or not, researchers check to see if it has a good reputation, if its facts are correct, if the information has no spelling errors. Calacanis compares the Web searchers at Mahalo to restaurant reviewers, those with a distinct palate and can distinguish good from bad.

“Imagine having 100 people who were just the most amazing reviewers of restaurants, but instead of reviewing restaurants, they were doing Web sites,” he said.

The start-up has secured the financial backing of investors including Sequoia Capital, News Corp., CBS Corporation, Burda Media and Elon Musk.

“Every percentage point of the search market is worth a billion (dollars),” Calacanis said. “If we get 1 percent of people using Mahalo, we would be worth a billion.”

For Mahalo, that means about 25 million people using the site every month, Calacanis said. The site currently attracts tens of thousands of users a day.

But because many users depend on Google and Yahoo! for searches, the success of small start-ups like Mahalo will really depend on its marketing power, said Gina Jerry, the chair of the Computer Science and Information Systems Department at Santa Monica College.

Google and Yahoo! already post the most relevant searches at the top of the page and don’t randomly sort the results, Jerry added.

“If you’re happy where you are, why are you going to move?” Jerry asked.

Mahalo is not in competition with Google, Calacanis said. Rather, the two companies have a collaborative relationship.

“We’re sort of curating the best of that stuff,” Calacanis said.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 11, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/071107.pdf?ref=smdp.com)