Mahalo 2.0: Search Result Pages Built on Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 2 - Mahalo, the human-powered search engine and web directory, has been busy recently expanding it's array of content. In December, they launched Mahalo Answers, which offers payments to users that can provide the best answers. Yet, since it's a human-powered website, Mahalo has only been able to grow as fast as people have been able to create content. So now, it's turning to social media to fill in the gaps.

The company has just dropped the beta tag from their logo and launched Mahalo 2.0. Along with a new logo and a design facelift, the startup has improved user control of pages. Most notable of all, however, is that Mahalo has created a system that pulls information from multiple social media sources to create web pages for every search term.

Mahalo pages of old contained byte-sized summaries, questions and answers, quick facts, reviews, and some social media content, like Youtube () videos. Mahalo 2.0 has added a lot more content. The service is utilizing multiple social media APIs to add images (via Flickr ()), videos (via YouTube), and discussion of the specific topic on Twitter (). While we can't post the full screenshots (because these pages are incredibly long), take a look at Bob Dylan's page on Mahalo, before and after, to get an idea of what's going on:

Mahalo: Previous Layout
Mahalo 2.0 Layout

From what we can tell, this can nearly double the amount of content available on a Mahalo page. Unless of course, the search term doesn't exist in the Mahalo system, in which case it will create a page based on the same social media APIs. This means Mahalo can create a nearly-unlimited amount of pages with content - pages that can be indexed, shared, and edited.

User control has also gotten a boost. Users can edit these new, automatically-generated pages with a one-click interface and become page managers. This is important because page managers get 50% of a page's revenue, so this new release could spark a new push by regular Mahalo users to become the admins of these newly-created pages. Page managers can even embed pages on other websites. However, it still comes with a catch: you've got to edit the page every week or you lose it.

Mahalo is smart to create pages that users have not via social media. This content is rich, dynamic, and filled with the keywords and search engine optimization (SEO) juice that has helped Mahalo grow in the Google () rankings. Yet there has been controversy with Mahalo pulling questions from Twitter for its Mahalo Answers program, and it's possible that some users may argue that this as stealing their social content for Mahalo's gain. Regardless, Mahalo has become even more useful, if not a bit too cluttered.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/02/mahalo-20/