Mahalo FAQ

What is Mahalo?

• Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links.

What does Mahalo mean?

• Mahalo is Hawaiian for Thank you.

Why use Mahalo?

Save time

• We take the time to find and organize the best links for search terms, so you don't have to. With traditional search engines you need to figure out the right search term and find relevant results within an unorganized list that often contains irrelevant results, spam, and some mediocre sites. With Mahalo, you can enter a simple search term and instantly get an organized page of results that only includes great links.
• Our results contain everything you need to know about a topic and are organized into sections to help you quickly find what you need. For example, our travel pages for cities contain sections on basics (weather, current events, maps, history), flights, vacation packages, transportation, activities, attractions, events, tours, hotels, restaurants, shopping, nightlife, and local blogs.

Discover great new links

• Many of the great links we find are very hard to find on Google. People who use Mahalo often find great links that they'd never discovered with Google, despite many searches. Our comprehensive result pages also offer great related links that you may not have thought to look for.

Spend time enjoying great content instead of looking for it

• People spend a lot of time on traditional search engines just looking for great content. Because every Mahalo link is great, you can spend your time enjoying great new content instead of looking for it.

Say goodbye to spam, mediocre content, and deceptive sites

• Mahalo never links to spam, mediocre content, or deceptive sites. It's that simple.

We focus on the areas where traditional search engines struggle

• Search results for certain categories, such as products, travel, cars, and health, are cluttered with people selling things, making it difficult to find great information on those topics. We focus on those topics and provide organized results that offer great links for every type of info you could need.

What if Mahalo hasn't written a page for my search term?

• If we haven't written a page for a search term, we return a few related Mahalo pages and Google results alongside tabbed results from other search engines and online services. If you'd like us to write a page for a specific search term that we're missing, you can actually help us build the page by logging in or signing up for a Mahalo account and recommending links to that page. Sign up for a Mahalo account here.

What's the difference between a friend and a fan on my user profile page?

• A Friend is someone whom you have added as your friend and who has also added you as their friend.
• A Fan is someone who has added you as a friend, but whom you have not yet befriended.

How do I recommend links to Mahalo?

• You can recommend high-quality links to any search term on Mahalo, either by using Mahalo Follow or by clicking on the green plus sign under the User Recommended Links section. Note: you must have a Mahalo account to recommend links. Sign up for a Mahalo account here.

Why have the links I've recommended not been accepted?

• All user submitted links to Mahalo are examined by Mahalo's Guides to make sure that they meet our requirements for inclusion on the page. If the link you submitted is a great one, we'll add it to the main part of the page and you'll receive notification that it's been added and you'll show up as a contributor to that page. If we're not convinced that your link is absolutely one of the best links out there for the search term to which it was submitted, we'll leave it in the User Recommended Links section to see if other users also recommend it. If the link qualifies as spam or violates any of our Terms of Service, we will remove it from the page. You can see whether your links have been accepted or rejected from your profile page.
• For more information about what links Mahalo will / will not include in our search results, please see What sites will I find / not find on Mahalo?

What is Mahalo Follow?

• Mahalo Follow is a toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that suggests Mahalo pages in a sidebar that are related to pages you're viewing in your browser. You can also use Mahalo Follow to submit links to Mahalo searches, and if you're using Mahalo Follow in Firefox, you can simultaneously submit links to Mahalo, your Twitter, and Del.icio.us accounts.

What is Mahalo Social?

• Mahalo Social adds a variety of community-oriented features to the Mahalo curated search system. In addition to faster and more organized ways to submit links, it allows Mahalo users to make friends and share links with one another.

Does Mahalo have an editorial process, and, if so, what is it?

• Yes. Mahalo has an editorial process to ensure that each search result is reviewed multiple times. Search results built in the Mahalo Greenhouse by our Part Time Guides are quality controlled by both our Mahalo Mentors and our Full Time Guides before being added to Mahalo. Search results built internally by our full time staff are checked by other Full Time Guides and our editors. We also have a place on every page where you, the public, can report problems or errors with our pages. Our Guides then check these errors and correct them. Additionally, we have a dead link checker which helps us remove links that are no longer functioning and a full time team watching the news to make sure that every hot search term or news item is updated quickly.

What if I love Mahalo results but I'm not ready to switch to Mahalo for all searches?

• We created a browser extension that allows you to continue to use your current search engine and view Mahalo results side-by-side, whenever we have a page for your search, without you doing any extra work. It's simple to install and free. You can download and install Mahalo Follow from here and see what others are saying about Mahalo Follow here.

Can I get involved with or contribute to Mahalo?

• Absolutely. Every Mahalo search result has a form to recommend a link for the page and a message board where you can discuss the page. We also have a program, called the Mahalo Greenhouse, where anyone can write search result pages and get paid for each page that we accept to Mahalo. Learn more about the Mahalo Greenhouse.

Why do short searches work better on Mahalo?

• Mahalo search results are organized into sections and comprehensive. For example, each product page includes the following sections: buying guides and information, retailers, comparison shopping, coupons and deals, etc. As a result, if you're looking for hot tub information and reviews, you can simply enter "hot tub" and you'll get all the links you were looking for and a bunch of helpful related links.

What is the press saying about Mahalo?

• See the Mahalo Press Coverage Page

What are all these symbols next to the links?

• We have three types of symbols: Warnings  , Guide's Choice  , and What is? icons. Warnings warn you about a link that we thought necessary to include, but which may be unnecessarily ad-heavy, have a pop-up, require a free account, or suffer from some other problem that makes the link not quite as nice as we'd all like it to be. Some warnings will be more informational, letting you know, for example, if a link leads to a site that is partially in another language. A full list of our warnings can be found on our Mahalo Warnings page. If you hover over the warning symbol with your cursor, a text explanation of the warning will appear. Example:  
• The Guide's Choice symbol   is a shaka sign, a Hawaiian symbol commonly used as a greeting. On Mahalo, it means that one of our Guides really likes the link that the shaka follows. If you hover over the Guide's Choice symbol with your cursor, the name of the Guide who recommends the link will appear next to a brief explanation of why the link is recommended. Example:  
• We also have our What is? icon. We place this icon next to sources with which you may not be familiar. These icons link to a What is ... ? page that provides a brief description of the site and why we use it here at Mahalo. Example: Technorati

What are (Sponsored) or (Partner) links?

• When a visitor clicks on a link marked as (Sponsored) or (Partner), Mahalo receives a commission if the visitor goes on to complete a purchase at the website.

I noticed on the Guide profile pages that many of the results are marked as 60%, 75%, or 90% complete? Why aren't any of them 100% complete?

• On each search result page, we continually add and prune links as we strive to include 100% of the best links available. We mark each page a % complete to indicate how close we think it is to our ideal. We encourage every one who uses the site to help us reach our ideal by recommending links, reporting problems, and participating in our message boards.

What sites will I find / not find on Mahalo?

1. We will not link to:
   1. ... spam sites.
   2. ... non-spam sites that have deceptive, or overbearing, advertising. For example, we will not link to splogs - spam blogs that have nothing but ads above the fold, forcing you to scroll down to get to the content, which might be scraped from another site. This includes sites that are largely advertorial.
   3. ... any sites that give the appearance of participating in phishing or any other type of malicious activity ("phishing" being the fraudulent acquisition of sensitive personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity).
   4. ... sites that simply regurgitate information from other sites with or without giving credit where credit is due. For example, if you have a blog that you use to simply aggregate your favorite posts about gadgets from other, more notable gadget blogs (such as Engadget or Gizmodo)—without adding substantial value and information via your blog—then we will always link directly to the source of the information rather than to your blog.
   5. ... sites which scrape or re-purpose other people's content without permission. Note: We are not able to police every site we link to, so we will make mistakes. If we're linking to a site which you feel is misappropriating your content please let us know by clicking the "Report" link on the search result page in question.
   6. ... sites of unknown origin (i.e. we cannot establish who operates the site).
   7. ... sites which have adult content or hate speech.
2. We will link to:
   1. ... sites that are considered authorities in their field (i.e. Edmunds for autos, Engadget for consumer electronics, and the New York Times for news).
   2. ... sites which create original, high-quality content on a consistent basis.
   3. ... sites that have been operating for over one year. Sites under a year will be considered, but most will be placed in a "member-submitted" section at the bottom of the page until they hit the one-year mark.
   4. ... sites that have clean layout, design, and a modest amount of advertising.

What happens to sites that you block or remove from your pages for copyright infringement?

• Just as we create a list of trusted sources that we use to build our search results, we also have a list of sites that we will not link to because they infringe on the copyright of others. Any site removed from Mahalo for infringing is banned from Mahalo as a whole and added to this list.

How do I get my site listed on Mahalo?

• See Mahalo's Guide for Publishers

I recommended a site and you didn't add it to your search result pages. What gives?

• There could be numerous reasons for this. Perhaps your site is too new and hasn't really established itself online. Perhaps your ad placement was too over the top, and your site was determined to provide good content, but at the expense of a good browsing experience. Perhaps your site, being a good site about a search result, was simply beat out by all the best sites about that same search result. See our list describing sites you will and will not find on Mahalo for more information.

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