Believe it or not, Mahalo is Growing
Human-built search engine Mahalo appears to be shooting past the traffic numbers it got when it launched, according to Heather Hopkins at traffic analyst firm Hitwise. — Mahalo pages are collections of the most useful links regarding a wide variety of timely topics in popular niches.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mahalo spent the second half of 2007 building out a human-powered search stack: the Mahalo Greenhouse opened paid page-building to contributors in June, the Follow toolbar put its hand-picked results alongside Google and other engines from August, and by December it had added the social graph to search results while Calacanis argued editorial curation could outwit machine-driven ranking. Not everyone bought it — one prominent analyst called the model fundamentally flawed back in November.
The new data point is Hitwise's Heather Hopkins confirming Mahalo's traffic has climbed past its launch-window numbers, a reading that matters because Hitwise measures actual clickstream rather than self-reported stats — and because Hopkins frames it against the same-week launch of rival human-search experiment Wikia.
First-order effects
- Mahalo now has third-party clickstream evidence, not just founder claims, that its curated-pages approach is pulling real search traffic past its May 2007 launch levels.
- The Follow toolbar is doing distribution work: every page view on the open web becomes a chance to surface Mahalo results inside the user flows dominated by the major search engines.
Second-order effects
- Wikia's competing human-search launch lands in the same measurement window, forcing both projects to compete for the same 'search needs a human layer' narrative and the same contributor pools that the Greenhouse recruits from.
- Publishers and SEOs gain a new optimization target — getting onto a Mahalo topic page becomes a distinct discipline from ranking in algorithmic results, since editors rather than crawlers decide inclusion.
Third-order effects
- If Hitwise-style growth holds, search fragments into an algorithmic base layer with human-curated overlays sold as alternatives or add-ons, making editorial labor a genuine cost center and moat in a business previously run on machines.
- The economics get tested publicly: Mahalo reportedly raised around $20 million (still unconfirmed) to fund hand-built pages, so sustaining growth requires proving curation scales without eroding the quality that differentiates it.
The trend: Human-powered search challengers are testing whether paid editorial curation can carve durable traffic out of an algorithm-dominated search market.