Peter Kafka reports on the changes at Jason Calacanis's search engine, Mahalo, which is overhauling its visual layout and adding a new feature that pays users for maintaining search results pages. The
latter is a big change for the so-called "human-powered search engine", offering users the chance to "own" a results page and split any ad revenue with Mahalo.
Calacanis will pay users
with "Mahalo bucks" which Kafka notes cash out at 75 cents on the dollar. This means users would really keep 37.5 percent of each dollar their page generates, he says. The Mahalo founder and CEO says
some of his pages generate up to $10,000 per year in ad revenue, but most make far less. One wonders if this is enough to encourage people to build and maintain Web pages? Calacanis currently employs
50 people to make Mahalo's results pages, but he says that over time, that number will shrink as more users take over results pages. In the future, he sees Mahalo as having dozens of editors who will
oversee "hundreds" of workers. "We think this will become a half-time to full-time job for a large number of out-of-work people," he says.
Read the whole story at D: All Things Digital »