Startup Mahalo aims to combat Yahoo, Google with 'semantic relationships'

"We know not everybody wants to give up Google or Yahoo," acknowledged a CEO of a startup that aims to compete with them both. But the future of search, he says, could involve more features than either ever considered.

Search pages of the future might incorporate user-contributed URL links, product recommendations from other social networks, and semantic searches, suggested Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, in a keynote speech Wednesday at the Search Strategies 2008 Conference and Expo.

Brooklyn, NY-raised entrepreneur Calacanis, now a denizen of Silicon Valley, has been spending the past year building a futuristic search site, with the help of some 400 employees. By now, Mahalo has received 4.1 million unique visitors, according to the founder of Weblogs.com, a network of 85 blogs.

Before that, Calacanis got one of his first tastes of successful entrepreneurship earlier in this decade when he started the Silicon Alley Reporter newspaper, renamed it the Venture Reporter, and sold it to Dow Jones.

As one part of his vision for Mahalo, Calcanis is now looking at presenting recommendations for books and movies that give greater weight to the opinions of personal friends and other "trusted" individuals than people the user has never heard of.

To help social networkers weigh recommendations about how to spend their paychecks, Mahalo is working on a model of "semantic relationships" which also takes into account "states between people and objects," he said. If the object is a place, for example, "want to live there" would represent a different semantic state than "have lived there."

When pressed to reveal some of the semantic algorithm's secrets, Calcanis actually divulged one: "[This is all] very nuanced. We don't even know [yet] what the algorithm will be," he told the audience.