Mahalo

Mahalo (Hawaiian for 'Thank You') is "...is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links".

It could be seen as a confluence of Digg, Wiki and Google, far out-doing what each of those three do individually. Of course it has its drawbacks, considering that it is human-powered, still in Beta, and a lot remains to be seen as to how the search results keep pace with constant changes.

While Jason Hiner heralds it as the future of Search, I tend to disagree. Even for the purpose of research oriented information gathering, Mahalo has a huge amount of drawbacks. I tried the term 'Prince', with the intention of finding more information about the program that converts XML to PDF. Heres what Mahalo came up with...all results related to the singer Prince.

Google got to princexml.com at least as the ninth in its list.



So, I think it will be quite some time before this human powered mechanism can arrive at a dependable database of search results. Till then it is Google for me.