On Mahalo (or, Where's the sweet spot for the fat head without the long tail?)

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about Mahalo.

I think Mahalo has great results. Especially for non-techies. I asked my friend yesterday whether she'd rather look at the results for Mercedes Benz S-Class at Mahalo or at Google. She instantly wanted Mahalo. Me too.

For the fat head of results that Calacanis is aiming for, he's going to get great results. There's no question a human touch will help.

The issue is the average user won't know the distinction between the fat head and long tail. Moreover, I don't think they'll care enough to use two search engines for different purposes. Google provides alright results for my example above, it's just not as pretty and easy to understand as Mahalo. But Mahalo doesn't provide any useful results for Openomy, while Google does. Sure, Mahalo is trying to use Google here, but their "More results from our friends at Google" thing just doesn't cut it from the user experience (performance, grouped results, etc).

I'm trying hard to find out where the sweet spot is for Mahalo, then. Jason wants to ensure his service is used by the mainstream web users, but are those users really going to be able to know when to which search engine? Are they even going to want to use two search engines when one can provide average results for all terms, but the other doesn't even provide any for half of what they search for? Even the average user dips into the long tail quite often.

I think Mahalo can do well even if they don't figure this out. Search is such a large market that even the smallest success is pretty good money. But it won't be a Google killer, that's for sure. I don't know what the answer to this is yet, but it seems likely that an innovative solution in their upcoming platform could help them bridge the gap and hit their sweet spot.

Labels: calacanis, jason calacanis, mahalo, search