Mahalo is a relatively new type of search engine that should be of interest to educators and or anyone tired of getting irrelevant search engine results. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a review of Search the Tail and explained how it is a great search engine tool for educators and students (click here to see that review). Mahalo is similar in that it helps users refine search results through the use of a categorical search system. Mahalo users have the option of performing a general search or a search with a specific category (similar concept to the EBSCO search engine). My estimate is that Mahalo has at least 500 categories to pick from on its alphabetized list of categories. (Click here to see the categories list). The best feature of Mahalo is that every link returned on a search has been reviewed by a real person to authenticate the relevancy of links to the search term and to guarantee that the links provided are not spam, advertising only sites, pornographic, plagiarized, or of an unknown origin.

Application for Educators
As I mentioned above the concept of Mahalo’s use of categories is similar to EBSCO. The advantages of Mahalo over EBSCO are that Mahalo is free and is much easier to navigate than EBSCO. As a high school teacher, every year I spend much more time than I would like trying to show students how to find results on EBSCO. Mahalo’s concept is similar, but so much easier for the average student to navigate and find relevant results on. (I held a research race in my 9th grade class this morning to test this theory).
The other great feature and the focal point of Mahalo’s purpose is the human reviewed aspect of the search engine. Being human reviewed means that Mahalo can ensure that links not relevant or appropriate for a high school setting are filtered out and not returned on a search.