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FoxMarks to Power Search Engine, kill Mahalo

TechCrunch reports that Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3 fame) is building out his bookmark synchronization service Foxmarks into a search engine, using meta-data entered by users to power search results. Foxmarks counts 20 million unique URL’s in its human-powered index.

Del.icio.us should have been used by Yahoo! to do this the day after they were acquired. I suggested something similar in an earlier discussion about how Google’s AdSense could better serve ads. Point being: Yahoo is again failing to innovate or capitalize on their assets. They truly are the death by shareholder standard bearer.

Is Foxmarks a Google killer? Probably not. But: they have a growing asset with their human powered index, and the core bookmark-syncing system provides a value-added vector for spreading the tool and the brand. A flurry of press coverage could provide it with the impetus it needs to grab a piece of the search pie.

Is Foxmarks a Mahalo killer? Yes. Search engines fall on a continuum of totally alogorithmic (Google) and totally human (DMOZ, Mahalo). Foxmarks sits in the middle, occupying what I think is the sweet spot - it blends the volume handling of the algorithm with the data categorization of humans, adds in aggregation to increase credibility and smooth outrider results, and bundles it all together.

Of course, all of this discussion is academic. I haven’t seen Foxmarks in action, as I wasn’t at Foo Camp.

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