Mahalo.com debuts news feed
Jason Calacanis unveiled a new home page for his Santa Monica-based Web search company, Mahalo, today at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.
The revamped Mahalo.com features a news feed updated by his team every few minutes. The company, which offers what it calls a human-powered search engine, relies on people rather than software algorithms to update search results pages. It has also set up webcams in its office so users can watch editors update the site.
"We were seeing 10,000 people a day coming to our current home page two to three times a day in order to see our news headlines," Calacanis said. "We realized that while we were as fast in changing our home page as, say, Drudge or CNN, there was an opportunity to go 10 times faster. So, we've designed the new homepage to refresh every two to three minutes, 24 hours a day."
Calacanis says he believes the future of search is based on a combination of news, research and search. "This step moves us from Wikipedia plus Google to Wikipedia plus Google plus CNN," he said.
-- Jessica Guynn
