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Mahalo Answers takes on Yahoo! Answers with money
Mahalo launched about a year and a half ago as a sort of human-powered search engine. Now the site has curated search results for around 100,000 search terms. They're sort of like Google search results, except human beings have helped select the items they think you'd be most interested to highlight.
And today the company launched Mahalo Answers, which fills several functions. First, it allows anyone at all to post a question and get answers from Mahalo employees or anyone else who feels the urge to post an answer. Mahalo may incorporate those answers into its general search results, which helps flesh out the content on the main Mahalo.com page. But there's another way Mahalo, and you, can make money using Mahalo answers.
When you're asking a question you can offer a "tip" for the best answers. Tips are paid in Mahalo Dollars, which is another way of saying US dollars. But Mahalo takes a cut of 25% when you withdraw any money in your account. So if you've made $100 by providing top notch answers to questions, you can either ask 10 questions and provide $10 tips yourself or you can withdraw $75.
The service will go head to head with Yahoo! Answers, but Yahoo! doesn't allow the exchange of money. The now-defunct Google Answers did, but Mahalo Answers is much more flexible. You can choose to provide tips for multiple answers. Or if you don't like any of the answers you can rescind your tip, although it will show up on your profile which may affect the quality of answers you get to future questions.
Mahalo Answers also allows users to post questions and answers with video, pictures, and music while Yahoo! Answers is a text-only site. Of course, Yahoo! already has a significant user base, which means that you're much more likely to get a good answer from the Yahoo! community today than from the Mahalo community. But who knows about tomorrow?
