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Mahalo Launches [nanoblog]

1994 called. It wants its search engine back. Not to be a wet blanket, but that was my immediate reaction when I saw Mahalo, which offers handcrafted search results for popular search terms. Although it claims to be the “first human-powered search engine,” it seems little more than a link directory in the tradition of Yahoo!’s original handmade directory or a site like About.com, powered by volunteer “guides.” And hey, what’s wrong with dmoz, the Open Directory Project? It boasts 75,151 editors. Nevertheless, I wish them luck and will definitely be trying Mahalo for broad search terms (like “macintosh”) that return an overwhelming number of results in Google, but Google for narrow searches (like “macintosh powerbook hard drive upgrade”), which, um, also return an overwhelming number of results. Via Blankbaby.