In an effort to significantly increase its content

Jun 3, 2009 08:43 GMT  ·  By

Mahalo is another search engine competing in a crowded yet clearly dominated market and, just like any other search engine, it's trying to offer something very different if it's going to drive people from Google. As such, what makes it different is that it relies on its users to create the results rather than on computers or algorithms, the Wikipedia of search engines if you will. The search engine hasn't exactly been a huge success but it has seen some steady growth, and now it's trying to accelerate this growth by offering cash rewards to editors.

Mahalo works by having people create the search engine result pages to include text listings as well as photos and video. Each page has links to the top seven sites relating to the subject as well as results from news, blogs or Twitter. It has been steadily adding pages, numbering at over 100,000 now, but for less popular searches it relies on Google. However, it will need to get from 100,000 to millions of topic pages if it wants to be competitive, and one way it's trying to do that is to pay editors for their services.

In the new system users will be able to claim a page regarding a certain topic. They will be responsible for adding and updating the content on that page and in return they will get 50 percent of the revenue the page generates through ads. Users won't get actual money but Mahalo Dollars, though these can be converted into cash or spent in Mahalo in the future. One page doesn't add up to that much, generating around $20 - $50 a year, but if you manage more than one page it could mean a nice sum of money. This also means that the editors will be directly interested in the traffic that page generates and may take it upon themselves to promote it.

A problem for the system for now is that once a user claims a page it's theirs and if a better expert comes along at a later date he won't be able to do anything about it. This will apparently be changed in Mahalo 2.1, allowing users to sell topics for Mahalo Dollars of course. Whether or not this will lead to a lot of speculation or the system will prove successful remains to be seen.