This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth. The following chart shows the weekly share of US Internet visits to Mahalo and Cha-Cha over the past six months.

Mahalo may look huge relative to Cha-Cha so let me put that into context. Mahalo ranked 69th last week among Search Engines and received 0.02% of all US Internet visits to Search Engines compared with Google's 55.52%. We started seeing enough traffic to the site in July to report on it regularly and in the past three months, the site's visits are up 53%.

Mahalo appeals more to younger Internet users, 18-24 year olds in particular. The following chart compares Mahalo's visits by age group to the US online population. As you can see 18-24 year olds were 36.67% more likely to be on Mahalo.com than average.

Hitwise US: Mahalo.com Age Representation Compared to the Online Population
Four weeks to 5th January 2007

Mahalo receives most of its traffic from Search Engines (76% last week) and sends most of its traffic to Entertainment (37%) and News and Media (19%) websites. Visitors seem particularly interested in games websites such as GameSpot, IGN Cheats and Game FAQs and News and Media websites, in particular, Google News and other online news sources.

Mahalo is gaining momentum slowly but surely.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.