GeekSG

Mahalo is a human powered search engine that gives you results to your search terms that are hand-picked by their staff. They have around 40 full time staff adding result pages for each search term daily and are estimated to have 10,000 result pages by the end of the year. Each result page can then cater to several different queries of the same category.

If a search term is not yet indexed by Mahalo, they will then display Google search results in their page. Human powered search may indeed give better results than those that run on algorithms as systems may frequently misinterpret the user’s intentions. Also, the problem with algorithm-based searches is that people are able to game the systems (this is where SEO come in) but there’s no way (except bribery) to affect the results on human-powered searches.

Robert Scoble has even predicted that Mahalo may be able to overthrow Google within 4 years though he got flamed pretty bad for his argument.

Also check out their daily show, the Mahalo Daily, where Veronica Belmont who used to work for CNET talks about anything from cleaning your keyboard to the new Tesla electric car.

Update:  Mahalo has announced that it has hit 25,000 result pages in Dec 2007, the target they have set for Dec 2008.