Mahalo is a new “human powered” search engine, currently in an alpha release. Not sure what alpha means when applied to human powered search (”We’re still working out the bugs in our humans”), but it sounds… neat?
It certainly looks nice, and the results seem good; if it doesn’t have a hand-written page for your query it shows Google’s results, always a safe bet, under what I’m guessing are some sponsored results.
Incidentally, on most of their sub-pages, they also show todays “top 20″ searches. “Linux” is number 8. I found this interesting because “Linux” is always the first query I put into a new search engine. It’s not necessarily even a good litmus test, because the logical top results for Linux are fairly obvious. (Mahalo’s #1 result was the Wikipedia page for Linux; I thought that was a pretty good choice, considering the enormous volume of information out there on the subject.)
While I don’t know what alpha means in this, I can tell you that mahalo is Hawaiian for “thank you”. Relevant, dunno…but it’s all my 2 cents will buy…
Mahalo!