WebProNews

Everyone knows that, when a graph's vertical axis goes to 100, whatever is plotted on it will look very different than if that axis went to 1,000.  So here's Mahalo's good news/bad news situation: a certain diagram makes its growth look astounding, yet it's still leagues behind Google, Yahoo, and even Ask.

We're in no way criticizing the chart-making abilities of Heather Hopkins, mind you; Hitwise UK's vice president of research simply constructed something that made it easy to compare Mahalo and ChaCha.  As a result, Mahalo's growth since July of 2007 approached something akin to a 45-degree angle.

But the top of the chart is equal to a 0.0025 percent market share, and so Hopkins herself writes, "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%."

Remember all the hoopla when Mahalo launched?  Perhaps only (the still-private) Powerset has made waves as big as those.  So the Mahalo data helps demonstrate how difficult it is to break into the search market, and the ChaCha stats only further prove the point - its market share has dipped down to 0.00029 percent.

Meanwhile, it was only two days ago that Hitwise reported Google's new high of 65.98 percent.