Mahalo.com was a

web directory A web directory or link directory is an online list or catalog of websites. That is, it is a directory on the World Wide Web of (all or part of) the World Wide Web. Historically, directories typically listed entries on people or businesses, and th ...

(or

human search engine A human search engine was a search engine that used human participation to filter the search results and assist users in clarifying their search request. The goal is to provide users with a limited number of relevant results, as opposed to tradition ...

) and Internet-based knowledge exchange (

Question-and-answer website The following is a list of websites that follow a question-and-answer format. The list contains only websites for which an article exists, dedicated either wholly or at least partly to the websites. For the ''humor'' "Q&A site" format first popul ...

) launched in May 2007 by

Jason Calacanis Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York. His second venture, Weblogs, Inc., a publishing company tha ...

. It differentiated itself from algorithmic search engines like

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

and

Ask.com Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design. Wa ...

, as well as other directory sites like

DMOZ DMOZ (from ''directory.mozilla.org'', an earlier domain name, stylized in lowercase in its logo) was a multilingual open-content directory of World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintained it were also known as the Open Directory ...

and

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

by tracking and building hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular search terms. President Jason Rapp exited the company in September, 2012. In 2014, Calacanis announced that Mahalo would enter

server sunset In the realm of information technology (IT), to sunset a server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, t ...

as he moved his focus towards an app called Inside. He was quoted by

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saying "it makes 7 figures so we’re not shutting it off but we are not investing in it". Mahalo's website has since shut down.

Mahalo Answers

On December 15, 2008, Mahalo launched a new service called Mahalo Answers, similar to

Yahoo! Answers Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were org ...

. A key difference was that Mahalo Answers allowed questioners to give a monetary reward (called a "tip") to the user who provided the most helpful response.

Mobile applications

The company developed mobile apps, such as ''Learn Guitar''.

Criticism

At the ''SMX Conference'' in June 2007, Google software engineer

Matt Cutts Matthew Cutts (born 1972 or 1973) is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 20 ...

explained that while he supports different approaches to search it is untrue that humans have nothing to do with Google's search results. Cutts has categorized mahalo.com as spam. He used the terms "cookie cutter", "no value" and "no original content" to describe the website and described Jason Calacanis as "skilled... at baiting people" in the context of running Mahalo.com.

Corporate details

Ownership and funding

Lead investors in Mahalo.com included Sequoia Capital's

Michael Moritz Sir Michael Jonathan Moritz (born 12 September 1954) is a Welsh billionaire venture capitalist, philanthropist, author, and former journalist. Moritz works for Sequoia Capital, wrote the first history of Apple Inc., '' The Little Kingdom'', ...

;

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...

, founder of

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

; and

News Corporation News Corporation (abbreviated News Corp.), also variously known as News Corporation Limited, was an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New ...

. Other disclosed investors include Dallas Mavericks owner

Mark Cuban Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American billionaire entrepreneur, television personality, and media proprietor whose net worth is an estimated $4.8 billion, according to ''Forbes'', and ranked No. 177 on the 2020 ''Forbes'' 400 list ...

and AOL chairman

Ted Leonsis Theodore John Leonsis (born January 8, 1957) is an American businessman, investor, filmmaker, author, philanthropist, and former politician. He is a former senior executive with America Online (AOL), and the founder, chairman, and CEO of Monument ...

said in 2008 that he has enough funding to run Mahalo for four or five years without making a profit.

Traffic and growth

Mahalo.com traffic had increased from roughly ten thousand visitors a month in July 2007, to two million visitors a month in January 2008. On March 1, 2011, Calacanis and company president, Jason Rapp, announced via email that the recent changes in the

search algorithm had significantly reduced traffic, resulting in the need to lay off about 10% of Mahalo employees. According to software firm Sistrix, Mahalo's Google generated search traffic declined by over 75% after these changes were made. In 2014, Jason Calacanis stated that these

Google Panda Google Panda is a major change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular " content farms", and return higher-qual ...

updates had been "killing" Mahalo, which once had $10 million in yearly advertising revenue, that he had to lay off 80 full-time remote workers as a result, and that he desired "revenge" against Google and their web spam expert Matt Cutts.

References

{{reflist, 2 Question-and-answer websites Companies based in Los Angeles County, California Online companies of the United States Internet search engines Internet properties established in 2007 Pay-per-click search engines Human-edited search engines MediaWiki websites Social search Knowledge markets