Mahalo’s Untapped Opportunity

I’ve been watching the early progress of Mahalo, the new “human powered” search engine launched by Jason Calacanis last month, more than I normally would a search-related startup in no small part because I’m impressed with and fascinated by the type and intensity of buzz Jason’s been able to create around it with so little cash outlay. As I spend more time considering the basic model of identifying and gathering the most interesting/relevant/current/popular/uniquely useful/etc. sites related to popular searches, I can’t help but think of just how important context is to search, and that while Mahalo’s broad-based approach to adoption may be a good starting point there might ultimately be more value to be found in applying their model to vertical search.

The first category that comes to mind: product search. How many times have you been in a store looking at a product wondering if it’s the right one of its kind to purchase? Or wanted to know more about its features or what other people have said about its reliability? Maybe do a price check? For me this is a regular occurance.

Case in point: last weekend, I made the trek to BuyBuyBaby to try to figure out new ways to contain areas of my house from the wall scaling, lock defying escape artist my 13 month-old son has become. Their selection of gates and movable walls was limited to six or seven choices, but I was there for instant gratification and was looking to make a decision on the spot. The problem was that I hadn’t spent a single minute researching the category and the staff there knew little more than I did. So as I usually do in these situations, I fired up the browser on my Treo 680, googled the model numbers of the gates that stood out from the crowd, and hoped there were enough practical reviews on Amazon to help me make my choice. There weren’t, so I left frustrated without a gate.

There are, of course, product review aggregation sites, and I use them from time to time, but they invariably suffer from either low quality results, a lack of results outside of a particular category or have reviews slanted toward the limited relationships their business development teams have been able to forge. Mahalo could have a unique advantage over these guys and the big search engines by applying human intelligence to the process and focusing on the items people tend to buy the most.

So here aremy suggestions. Enhance Mahalo to offer a place where people can type in the category of item they’re looking to buy (i.e. 58“ plasma TV, baby proofing gear, organic green tea, all-season performance tires) and see a current list of results pointing to Amazon review pages, product bake-offs on CNet, a great blog post describing a similar shopping experience, etc. Make a stripped-down, mobile version of the site that would offer this all this directly through Mahalo.com and auto-detect mobile browsers. Have Mahalo’s editors build and maintain a list of synonyms - including product names, model numbers, and alternate variants of search terms - for each SeRP so users don’t need to enter just the right query to get a match, and where possible, include pre-built links to whatever product search engine provides price checking for the top contenders in each category. Or better still, scrape these results or get a feed and include them directly in the SeRP page.

Once they’ve tackled product search, I’d suggest putting medical search next on the list. Again, it should be highly accessible from mobile devices so people in a doctor’s office trying to understand what’s being said to them can quickly and in real-time look up conditions, symptoms, medications, etc. and ask the questions we all either don’t know to or forget to ask. Leverage the AOL/Ted Leonsis connections to cut reciprocal deals with Steve Case’s Revolution Health and crush Google’s medical search.

There’s another piece to this but I’ll save it for another post.

Category: Mobile, Search, Startups || Tags: mahalo, Search ||