Looks like Jason Calacanis beat Jimmy Wales to the finish line. Calacanis just launched the alpha version of his human-powered search engine, Mahalo.com.
Serial entrepreneur Jason McCabe Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine, at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference. The site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet’s 4,000 most popular search terms completed. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.
The site is focused on the top English-language search terms, including verticals such as travel, products, news, entertainment, sports, food, and health. “Google’s mission is to index the world’s information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index,” said Calacanis. “It’s my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we’re going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years. I am really looking forward to hearing what people think of the Alpha,” he added.
If anybody still remembers, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was earlier reported to be developing a user-contributed search engine called Wikiasari.
But, why do I have this gut feeling these search model will not fly? Well, just look at the current state of Wikipedia and all that spam lurking around it. The bigger question becomes — can we really trust the wisdom of the crowd?
We can trust the wisdom of the crowd only if it’s read by machines. That’s what Google does. :)