Intruders

Launched last June, Mahalo.com brands itself as a human powered search engine. The search results, and there are 5,000 of them right now, are created by people instead of the auto generated search results that everyone is so accustomed to today.

Jason believes that “hand written” results will allow Mahalo to solve the search engine spam problem and to organize the information better. If Mahalo does not have an entry for your search query, it will display google search results instead.

Jason also announced a second part of Mahalo, the greenhouse program, during his presentation at the NMK forum in London. Mahalo will pay $10-15 (to the submitter or, alternatively, to the wikipedia foundation) for every new search entry that is accepted. Mahalo is looking to ramp up the number of search results to 10,000 by the end of 2007 and 25,000 entries by the end of 2008.

As he says himself, Jason was “in rare form” when this interview was recorded, and he really gets going on the importance of being supportive and encouraging to entrepreneurs. In his view Europe could learn from the United States in this regard.