So far, I am absolutely loving what Mahalo (Calacanis‘ brain child, apparently) can do. Basically, some experts in various fields are hired by Mahalo to piece together custom pages based on top search terms. The result is a lovingly crafted set of relevant search results representing all of the best the web has to offer for your search term. The whole effort ends up looking and acting just like some sort of hybrid search wiki.

Here’s some example searches I’ve performed:

Nintendo Wii (duh)
Halo
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Transformers
David Letterman

And, just for the fun of it:

Nerdflood (just gives Google results)

The result is astounding. Even better than just fantastic, relevant search results is the digging you can do to see the layers behind the data. After I searched for Gears of War, I found the user page of the guy who built it:  Evan D. There you can see all the other pages this user is responsible for, and the completion percentage of each page. Find out more about their tastes, and maybe get some insight into why they are attracted to building a search engine surrounding a particular topic of interest.

Searching for Nintendo Wii, I found Adam’s page, and noticed that he’s created over a hundred pages for Maholo.

What does this mean? Why is it important? It tells you something intrinsically vital about Mahalo: it’s built by people. It isn’t a set of bots, it isn’t AI, and it isn’t an algorithm. It’s people. Building webpages. The old fashioned way. It’s a mix of web 1.0 and web 2.0 together, and it’s beautiful.

Let’s hope everyone else sees the potential here.