Mahalo.com - Human Powered Search Engine

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine. Currently they have over 4,000 of the top English search phrases mapped with their own pages, and by the end of the year they hope to have 10,000. It´s a five year project, and this is only their fifth month. With Mahalo you are guaranteed to never run into any spam and to only get quality results, since each page is written by actual people and not algorithms. The Guides, or page writers, also help you in your quest for useful information by letting you know which sites are their favorites and which ones have something to look out for, whether it´s sound that automatically starts playing when you load the page or whether you should be 21 to enter the site. You can search for terms based on the categories they have created, or just by the typical typing in your specific search phrase. The cool thing about the fact that each search phrase has its own page is that each page is specific to that phrase, so that if you´re looking up pizza, then you´ll see sites to check out with recipes, places to go to eat the best pizza, different franchises that sell it, and that October is National Pizza Month. If you search for New York City, you´ll find sites with the weather, current events, photos, maps, various guide sites, its population, flights, and a lot more sites categorized specifically for NYC. It´ll be interesting to see how this method of search engine will pan out against the typical Google or social bookmarking types.

“Mahalo is the world"s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven"t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results. Mahalo. We"re here to help.”

They guarantee quality, and you don´t have to even check out a link to start gaining information on your search topic. Because of how the site is set up, you´ll end up spending more time checking out various search phrases and their pages because you can see what those phrases are and don´t just have to go off a blank page and a search box.

Will they make enough profit off of the site to afford all of the hours of work that will be going into this project?