Hmm - I see that Jason Calacanis is pumping Mahalo:

Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven't yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

How is this different from something like dmoz?

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The difference seems to be that Mahalo's editors are paid, whereas dmoz' are volunteers. I guess we'll see over the next couple of years whether that makes a difference or not - the problem with non-automated search is that results tend to get stale fast.

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