As technology progresses toward removing the inefficient and subjective human from regular processes, Mahalo jumps in to, well, include the inefficient and subjective human.

A new search engine has emerged – surprisingly – that challenge Google’s autonomous robots. Mahalo uses the power of people, not robots, to generate search results. Now this may sound all gravy at first glance, but when the world’s most successful and innovative search engine, Google, can return relevant search results in less than one-tenth of a second, without human intervention, I naturally question the longevity of Mahalo. The concept seems more like the old Yahoo Directory days or DMOZ than a cutting edge search engine.

There’s no question that the Web 2.0 paradigm encompasses user generated content, but user generated search engine results? If the purpose of user generated search results is to provide us searchers with better, more relevant content, then perhaps their vision is noble. However, I believe Google has adopted the same vision, minus a large staff of website hunters to make subjective decisions (ala Mahalo). Google has nearly mastered the art of utilizing technology and skilled programmers to automate search queries.

Furthermore, have the founders of Mahalo overlooked Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and so forth, or have they created something better which I’m completely missing? These social bookmarking sites track popular news and websites. They allow us to search the most popular news and websites with their built-in search engines. Seems to me, strikingly similar to Mahalo’s goal.

I gave Mahalo a quick test run. Did a few searches and wasn’t impressed with the results. The silly thing is, below the Mahalo search results were “More results from our friends at Google.” What I did enjoy was their category based results. On their main page, Mahalo has multiple categories like music, cars, health, entertainment and so forth. Click one of these categories and you can get more and more specific until you reach their recommended websites to visit. I found an excellent message board that was specific to my car, stumbled upon (what a great business name and concept!) some iPhone news, and located some nice Fleetwood Mac resources.

Forget Mahalo as a search engine. Remember it as a directory.

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