A company called ?Mahalo' is doing just that. What they've done is simply ingenious. Their ultimate aim is to have all their search results powered by humans ? in other words, a real person researches which sites provide the best information for a given search term. By comparison, Google is powered by computerized robots that trawl websites and make their best guess as to the nature and relevancy of the content. But computers often get it wrong. That's a weakness that Mahalo has used to its advantage.



Mahalo is a Hawaiian word for ?thank you' and the company's motto is ?we're here to help'. The obvious question is, ?how are they getting human powered search results for so many terms?' Actually, they're not. While they're going as fast as they can, they've been focusing their efforts on the most popular search terms that account for the largest percentage of queries, and ignoring local searches, say for a restaurant in your area.

Now, the really clever part is that Mahalo provides Google search results for queries that haven't been indexed by one of their ?guides' (staff). Can you see what that means? They've effectively got the best of both worlds. The end user receives the more accurate human search results where they're available, and the regular Google results if they're not. They also get revenue from Google Adsense. From the perspective of the user, it's a better experience than Google can provide!

There's more?.

Mahalo has about 60 employees, whereas Google has 10,000, but employees are expensive and often a hassle to maintain. So Mahalo started an initiative where they pay $10 for anyone who creates a page of search results for a search term. The payment increases by $1 for submitting more results, so the more you submit, the more you get paid. And they don't seem to have any trouble finding takers for this deal.

??there's probably a chink in the armor of every large company.?

Let me ask you, before you knew this story, would you have thought it was possible to compete with Google? I suspect not, but what you've just read indicates that there's probably a chink in the armor of every large company. Find that chink and you've found a goldmine. Can you see where this is heading?

A couple of issues ago I gave you a list of eBay's top sellers. What did you do with that list? Why not grab it and review it again, and try to find a weakness that you can exploit in some of these sellers. If necessary, buy something from them. Review their entire process. What did they do well, and what did they not do well? Ask yourself, ?what can I do better, faster, more cheaply, more friendlier, or more efficiently than them??

Think about this classic David and Goliath situation of Mahalo vs Google. Don't be intimidated by a big player in your marketplace. Think big, plan to succeed, and take massive action.

These days a smart, out of the box thinker with great marketing skills can definitely take on the ?big boys' and win. You've just read the proof, now it's your turn?