03 June 2009 | Author: Yasmin Sulaiman

New Mahalo aims to be "a better Wikipedia"

Mahalo hasn't made too much of a dent on the search scene since its launch in 2007, but this could change if its new revamp is successful. Its tweaked homepage looks more like Yahoo! than Google, with top news, top searches, popular questions and more spread out over an engaging interface.



Under its old business model, Mahalo paid contributors to organise links as well as information on popular search terms, in the hope that its pages would attract Wikipedia-like high rankings on Google search results pages. However, this approach cost them around $15 to assemble each page, and with 100,000 pages that needed to be tended to, it became a costly, inefficient venture.

This week, however, it announced a change: instead of being paid to organise links on a page, volunteers can claim pages for popular search terms and will then be given half the ad revenue generated by that page. According to a report in Business Week, most pages earn around $10 to $25 a month, but some - including "2009 stimulus package", generate several thousand dollars on a monthly basis. What's more, Mahalo will pay volunteers in its virtual currency, Mahalo Bucks - each of which is worth 75 cents in actual money - so the actual monetary recompense afforded to people that work on the site is likely to be minimal.

The idea takes the site a little closer to the model of Mahalo Answers, which rewards people who answer questions with points that notch up to various levels, and CEO Jason Calacanis says his main aim is to get to one million pages that attract tens of millions of unique users a month, in order to make Mahalo "a better Wikipedia". Yet the new model is certainly reminiscent of another online encyclopaedia, Google Knol, which lets users become 'experts' on particular subjects in the same way Mahalo allows volunteers to 'claim' certain pages.

And those Mahalo pages that are well-populated are certainly useful. At the time of writing, the most popular search on the site is for rapper Eminem, whose awkward encounter with Sasha Baron Cohen's Bruno at this weekend's MTV Awards has had many chins wagging. As well as a potted biography of the rap sensation, there's also a list of the top seven external links, a collection of images and videos, a list of Twitter posts about the rapper and links to his records on Amazon.com. It's all interesting and well-collated information that presents a much leaner alternative to Wikipedia and is easier on the eye, though some of the images collected are irrelevant.

As Business Week points out, Mahalo's main competition is not Google or even the recently launched Microsoft search engine Bing. Instead, it is sites like About.com, Yahoo! Answers and Squidoo to whom its new model - if successful - could pose a problem. And with new computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha still attracting headlines a few weeks after launch, it does seem like the tide could be turning away from Google over the coming year unless Mountain View makes some serious changes.

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