What is Mahalo?

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine. Founded by Jason Calacanis, Mahalo seeks to eliminate spam, mediocre content, and deceptive sites from our daily search results.

Mahalo Follow is a toolbar/sidebar extension for Firefox. This tutorial will take you step-by-step through its features.

Installation

To download Mahalo Follow, go to http://follow.mahalo.com

Scroll down and click on the “Install Mahalo Follow” button:

 

 

If the download doesn’t begin immediately, it means you have to give Firefox special permission to download from this website.

In the top right corner of your browser window, you’ll see a button labeled “Edit Options.”

 

 

Click on this button.

An “Allowed Sites” window will open. Click on the “Allow” button:

 

 

Then click the “Close” button.

The download should begin.

Add Search Engine

After restarting Firefox, you’ll be greeted with a message box asking if you’d like to add Mahalo as one of your Firefox search engines:

 

 

If you click the “Add” button, Mahalo will be added to your search bar:

 

 

Toolbar

Let’s go through the different toolbar features.

First you’ll notice the search box:

 

 

Clicking on the logo will take you directly to the Mahalo home page. Or, you can type your search term into the search box.

Next, you’ll see the “Random” button:

 

 

This is a great way to expand your horizons and learn something new.

Clicking this button will bring up a random Mahalo results page.

If you’d like to narrow down the results page to a specific category, just click the small black arrow located on the right side of the button. Then choose from the menu:

 

 

The Random button is followed by the “Directory” button. Clicking on it will bring up a thorough directory to help you find your search term:

 

 

To the right of the Directory button, you can choose whether or not you would recommend the current page to a friend.

If you’d like, you can hide the Mahalo toolbar from view.

Just go to the top of your browser and click View > Toolbars > Mahalo Toolbar:

 

 

Sidebar

The Mahalo Sidebar is quite unique.

By default, whenever you do a search on one of the major search engines (like Google) your sidebar will open up displaying the results from Mahalo.

Here’s an example:

 

 

Click on any of the results in the sidebar to open them up in your browser window.

If you’d prefer not to have the sidebar open automatically, you can disable this feature in the extension’s Options Window:

 

 

If you disable the automatic function, you can still manually open Mahalo results in the sidebar.

Just hit Ctrl+Shift+F on your keyboard, or click on the Mahalo toolbar button:

 

 

Mahalo Follow is a great tool to help you find quality search results.