Mahalo Pushes Human Powered Search Results

Maybe. Mahalo is based on the belief that any search algorithm no matter how sophisticated (uh, Google, Yahoo! that means you) is capable of being fooled and spammed thus damaging the quality of the results.

The search engine results themselves are created by Mahalo staff and select submissions from users ("Mahaloans?") and unlike Google's ordered lists of links and ads, Mahalo results offer a combination of wiki-like top-level summaries, popular content and reference materials. In addition, you can see the Top 20 pages for the day on every page.

Other features worth a look:

Warning Icons are used to indicate sites which are ad heavy, dated or suffer from other maladies which warrant attention.

"Hang Loose" Icons are used to handout kudos to sites with specifically useful features or content.

Mahalo Follow - Mahalo also offers a comparison tool plugin for Firefox called Mahalo Follow which allows users to compare results with Google when there is a match.

"When there is a match" is clearly one of the challenges for Mahalo. How long will it take to cover what other search engines cover topically? Will Mahalo ultimately have to have some form of machine-based mechanism for collecting content?

These challenges aside, I must admit to liking the Mahalo approach. It's not for every kind of search yet but it is a refreshing qualitative approach to search even if I can't find everything right now.