Jason Calacanis, Founder & CEO, Mahalo

Jason Calacanis, the founder and CEO of Mahalo, has been a successful Internet entrepreneur since the dotcom days. Since selling his media company, Weblogs Inc., to AOL for $25 million in 2005, and resigning from AOL as general manager of Netscape in 2006, Calacanis started Mahalo, a human-powered search engine. Internet Evolution spoke with Calacanis about his latest venture, his time at AOL, and his negative views of social networking, Valley Wag, and trust on the Internet.

Internet Evolution: What is Mahalo?

Jason Calacanis: Mahalo is a human-powered search engine, but it's also a research engine. So, it's a little confusing for some people in our industry as to what Mahalo is.

If you go to Mahalo.com/Boston what you'll see on the left-hand side is a bunch of links. These links are all hand-curated, so they're really well thought out. If you scroll down, there's information on a Boston vacation, basics about Boston, public transportation, government history, facts and information, and the news... We basically organize a search for you. If you type Boston into Google or Yahoo you're going to get a mixture of stuff. These are 100 percent spam free, all high quality. Think about these links as the best links that would basically save you a couple of minutes or a couple of hours of research.

Then on the right-hand side you have a guide note. The guide note is essentially a scannable Wikipedia article. Most people want to go to Wikipedia to scan a page. They don't want to read 5, 10, 15,000 words on a subject. A lot of Wikipedia pages are getting that long. The iPod page is 15 to 20 pages if you print it out. I printed it out accidentally the other day.

What we do is give you the fast facts, which are the things you're probably going to want really quickly... We can help people discover information, and we can take the most common facts people are looking for and surface them very high up. We take all those things that would be on the second click and we put them on the first click. So imagine if Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) owned the Wikipedia, or if Wikipedia owned Google. You put those two things together -- it's a pretty powerful starting page. We want to be the place where people start their research for the most common terms.

IE: Who creates these pages?

Calacanis: We have 400 freelancers who work in something called the greenhouse. They get paid on average $10 an hour to make one of these pages.

We also have a full-time staff, which checks all the stuff in the system.

Also you can go to the page and click "create an account," and you'll wind up seeing "edit guidenote and fastfacts" -- it's a relatively new feature... However, we check every section. We have a paid staff overseeing it. So, on the Wikipedia, anyone can edit it at anytime anonymously and nobody checks it. At Mahalo we have a team of people who check it against facts, and you have to be logged in at least.

IE: Can you explain human-powered search and how it works? It sounds a bit like reverse evolution. How do you respond to the idea that we're going backward?

Calacanis: I don't see it as an either/or. The best services are going to be the ones that use multiple systems. I think the algorithm is fine. Google is an incredible service. It's great, you can find anything on it. But that's also its weakness, right? There's too much stuff there. If you type in Paris hotels or Paris you're going to get millions of pages. We are going to give you a more concise version.

It doesn't really matter to me that people think that humans are antiquated. So I guess the answer would be no, I don't worry about that.

We know what the top searches are, and we can buy that data. So we purchase what the top searches are. And we then look at what's happening in the news. If something is happening in the news, like a crane collapse today, we'll cover that. So we watch the site tags on the news and we also have searches.

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