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The new kid on the block

At last there’s a real challenger to Google’s crown, says linton chiswick
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Right now, in a large office in Santa Monica, 40 web-searchers are being paid to Google the most popular search words. Then, they spend four or five hours indexing, annotating and refining the results of each and every search. Why? So you don't have to. Mahalo is an extraordinarily ambitious, labour-intensive and risky project. But the result, says entrepreneur and project leader Jason Calacanis, will be the internet's first 'human-powered search engine'. Were Mahalo (it's Hawaiian for 'thank you') an attempt to usurp Google with
 

'human-powered' search results for everything, then the task would be like tying the planet up in a daisy chain. But Mahalo will (eventually) provide search results for just the top 25 per cent of search terms that make up the vast majority of searches.
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These are the words and phrases - usually travel, entertainment or health-related - typed into Google again and again, often by the least skilled at finding the wheat among Google's chaff. The web-savvy have known for years that the internet's most interesting resources often don't arrive courtesy of Google's ingenious

 

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