Mahalo

History
Mahalo.com is a web directory, or human search engineand Internet-based knowledge exchange launched in alpha test in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis. It differentiates itself from algorithmic search engines like Google and Ask.com, as well as other directory sites like DMOZ and Yahoo! by tracking and building hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular search terms. The company also develops mobile apps. Mahalo means "thank you" in Hawaiian.Mahalo.com President Jason Rapp exited the company in September, 2012.

Platform uses
Mahalo.com's directory contracts human editors to review websites  and write search engine results pages  that include text listings, as well as other media, such as photos and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. ]  The company also pays freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation. The pages are approved by contract quality control site members on the QC Team prior to appearing in the main index. Mahalo.com started with the top 4,000 search terms in popular categories like travel, entertainment, cars, food, health care and sports and was adding about 500 more terms per week with the goal of covering the top 10,000 by the end of 2007.This goal had been exceeded when, in December 2007, Mahalo announced that its index has reached 25,000 pages, a year earlier than expected. Mahalo.com also offers "how to" guides that contain instructions on popular topics in an editorial fashion. Mahalo.com will deliver results for less popular searches from Google.

Number of users/other statistics
As of April 21, 2010 Mahalo had 9.4 million global (5.7 million US) unique monthly visitors, down from a peak of 14.1 million global (7.4 million US) unique monthly visitors, according to Quantcast <span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial;color:black;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;">.

In the news/interesting facts
<span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family: "ＭＳ明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; color:black;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Criticized for not being a reliable source of information and not as advanced as other platforms.

Similar platforms
Similar platforms include: Ask.com