Search engine street fighter
Source: Fast Company
Reviewed: 22-Aug-07
The Reporter sank along with the tech boom in 2000. A year earlier Calanicos, a brash, enthusiastic black-belt former street fighter from Brooklyn, had turned down $20m for the newsletter.
His rags-to-riches-to-rags story is something of a legend in the dotcom world. His story personified the outsider-gets-rich-through-pure-chutzpah essence of the dotcom years. Can he do it again?
His new idea is Mahalo (‘thank you' in Hawaiian), a search engine-come-directory powered by real people rather than just technology. He has $20m of venture capital behind the project, with blue-chip backers including Sequoia Capital, Newscorp, CBS and the founder of Paypal, Elon Musk, among others. The old-fashioned-sounding concept is based on the principle that people still have the edge over computers when it comes to figuring out what somebody is looking for, and that consumers still prefer a human to an automated answering system when they call up for help.
Calacanis's confrontational style has made him many enemies over the years. As one old friend, Douglas Rushkoff, puts it: "Jason would never stab you in the back. He might stab you in the face, though."
After his dotcom newsletter failed, Calacanis started a consumer blog Engadget, covering cars, video games, parenting and food, using authoritative technology reviewers. Within 18 months he sold the site to AOL for an estimated $25m.
After a year at AOL as general manager of its Netscape division, Calacanis quit having told his bosses that their search interface was cluttered with ads and that it needed "to love" its users more. He then decided to create his own search tool for people who do not like to search - one that used humans to sift only the cream of search results, mainly from Google.
Compared to Google's 200,000 servers and 10,000 employees, Mahalo has 20 servers and 60 employees, mostly out-of-work novelists, screenwriters, musicians, artists and actors. Calacanis has promised them 15% of the company when and if it goes public. In fact Google and Mahalo are working in sync, as Mahalo refers to Google those searches that it has not produced a results page for; it keeps 65% of the revenue for any such referrals.
Calacanis is also tapping into the Wikipedia model, using cash incentives instead of the users' own zeal for writing entries, by paying users to create page results. Full-time guides vet their work.
Calacanis will have to defy history to succeed: human-powered search engines Ask.com and Yahoo have never really challenged Google for search. Ask.com, previously Ask Jeeves, abandoned the human element and went down the Google route some time ago. But for Calacanis, anything less than becoming the next Yahoo, Google or eBay will be a failure.
Source:
Man vs Machine
Adam L Penenberg
Fast Company, September 2007
