As Danny reported yesterday, Jason Calacanis is backing a new search engine named Mahalo.
Mahalo is a human edited search engine, meaning - humans are aggressively cleaning up the search results by hand - something Google says they never do.
Here are sample searches you can look at: - ipod, showing you the top sites, quick facts, the ipod family, and a ton of information. To me this page looks like a static article on ipods. - barry schwartz, is an example of a search that was not hand written. They show a message that reads, "Oops! We haven't hand-written a result page for "barry schwartz" yet." And then they show related results for other people like Barry Bonds, and so on. Followed by that, they use Google search results. - google returns a page like ipod, but more focused around company information - like a financial page.
Mahalo would like to "hand-write result pages for the top 10,000 search terms." They are hiring and you can also recommend sites and links.
Current forum buzz and discussion is mixed. Danny concludes; "overall, the best solution probably isn't all human or all machine but some combination of the two."
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.