Socializing Search with Human Powered Search Engine, Mahalo

First, the background. Mahalo is a human-powered search engine launched sometime last year. If you’re not so into search engine technology, “human powered” simply means that unlike traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search, Mahalo creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. With the word “human” appended to its description, it is but no wonder that Mahalo is gradually evolving from a simple search engine, into a collaborative tool where members can work together in building up a great resource for quality links.

Whew! So much for the historical background and on with the point of this post. Mahalo is starting to evolve from a mere search engine into a social networking application. In fact it just introduced new features called Mahalo Social and Mahalo Follow 2.0.

Mahalo Social lets you recommend links, make friends, share link with Mahalo friends and pretty much a lot of things that you can with other social networking sites.

This social networking feature is a good feature in itself, but it becomes even better with the help of Mahalo Follow 2.0. Mahalo Follow lets you quickly recommend quality links using a toolbar. If you are familiar with Stumble Upon toolbar, that is similar to the Mahalo Follow toolbar.

The Mahalo Toolbar lets you recommend a particular link whenever you encounter them and thinks that the links are so good and useful that Mahalo ought to include these links into the Mahalo search results page.

Now, if I have convinced you to start using Mahalo with this short write up, here are some tips on how you can start using it:

• How to use Mahalo Social
• How to install Mahalo Follow
• Install Mahalo Follow
• Mahalo Blog

Hope you find those links useful.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.