Led by “serial entrepreneur” Jason Calacanis (blog | wikipedia), Mahalo is steadily gaining recognition, leading the whole “human powered” search movement (here are some great background articles: Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land, May 30, 2007 | Man vs. Machine, Adam L. Penenberg,   Fast Company, September 2007 | Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person, Brendan I. Koerner, Wired, March 24, 2008)

Their business model: By hand-creating 25,000 or so unique, SEO maximized launch pages for the most popular search terms, Mahalo is angling to get Wikipedia-esque referrals from Google-Yahoo-Live.  In turn, that traffic would parlay into advertising dollars via various “by click” and “by impression” ad networks (Chris “Long Tail” Anderson calls it a search engine arbitrage play).  It’s an ingenious strategy that almost has a “back to the past” feel.  As Danny Sullivan writes, “Often, the results were impressive. In some other cases, the humans had gone into overkill, listing so many related categories of information that I felt like I was using Yahoo back in 1999.”

Ah, 1999 Yahoo.  In my opinion, BG (Before Google), Yahoo was the best search engine primarily because of its human directory.  You’d put in a search term and a nice list of edited, relevant results would appear followed by a decent spider-based list dump.  Along the way, Yahoo lost interest (I’m not sure why, but they say it got too expensive?!).  In addition, SEOers were spamming the directory with marginal sites making it no more useful than, say, a Looksmart….but back to Mahalo…

Their traffic trajectory has been pretty impressive.  According to Koerner, users have increased ten-fold in just the past six months.  Supplementing the human “curated” pages are intelligent back-end list dumps (tabbed choices for all the popular search engines).  Perhaps, Mahalo’s biggest challenge is cracking the Google top page of results (especially, since they’re targeting the most trendy search terms).  Take something popular like Naruto.  I looked through the first 10 pages of Google (100 listings), and Mahalo’s page did not come up.  There are just too many pages with established, street-cred PageRanks, especially ninja websites.  

Other than that, the future of Mahalo looks pretty bright, bra.

It’s actually kind of amazing we’re launching ButtonALL this week.  I’m looking at our Basecamp (yeah, that’s what we picked as our collaborative/PM tool.  You could say, we’re sort of 37Signals fanboys.), and we literally started this project on May 14.  Four guys (that’s one less than the hamburger chain), two weeks, and, Good Lord, we have a fully armed and operational “search engine.”  Technically, a meta-search engine, but, nonetheless, it’s funny how the biggest expense of this enterprise up to this point was a “World’s Biggest Breakfast” platter at Satterwhites country restaurant in beautiful Goochland County, Virginia.

OK, some caveats…“Blueprints” for the project have been sitting around for a while.  4What has a kick-ass software engineer, Mr. Wray Mills, leading the way for our development team.  Wray is the Ruby on Rails Rock Star (say that 5 times quickly) that single-handedly coded Xerpi, one of the best social bookmarking sites on the Internet (more yummy than del.icio.us).  If you ever wanted a “favorites” web page with drag n drop functionality that you could access from any computer, then you should test-drive Xerpi (here’s an example page for any anime fans out there)….

It also helps that Buttonall is temporarily “sleeping on the couch” of Wray’s existing rails server.  This blog, by the way, is being hosted separately on a cheapo $5.95/month plan (cheaper than Biggest Breakfast) preloaded with Wordpress.  The spartan design of the blog is my doing.  I’m still learning how to pimp Wordpress, so please be patient with me.  

This week we are setting out on our ambitious (no-budget) marketing plan.  We’ll try pitching the story to a couple of local media contacts (see if we can get an “earned” story.  Perhaps, they’ll like the whole Richmond home grown angle).  Our first press release will be embargoed until we hear back from them.

Once local media has been notified, we’ll shoot out a national press release, primarily for SEO purposes (get buttonall.com recognized by the spiders).  I don’t think we’ll get any national media enquiries out of this.  That’s only going to happen if we continue to build a good, solid product.  I think our Red Button releases and companion blog will also draw some curious readers in.

Man, imagine if we were doing this full-time…