There was a huge blog storm over the last few days - Robert Scoble did a video and post on Facebook/Mahalo (et.al.) being a better long term answer than Google, and the flood gates just opened. Jason Calacanis has a short summary of links here;

I talked about this briefly yesterday, but this morning I was reading Danny Sullivan's tirade against Robert (and a tirade it was; he made some good points, but needed to sit on his post another couple of hours to cool down). In all of that, this popped out at me, as I've had the same thought:

Mahalo comes up next and how by using a small number of human editors, it can be harder to spam. Sure. So's the Yahoo Directory. You remember the Yahoo Directory, right? It used, um, a small number of human editors to categorize the web. Advances in crawler-based search engines meant you could get really good relevancy and be spam resistant, which caused the Yahoo Directory to effectively be abandoned by Yahoo. Mahalo's approach to custom-tailor the most popular searches is interesting -- but despite heaps and heaps of publicity the new service has had showered upon it, it still hasn't gained any real traction among searchers. Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results from me in May describes the service in more depth.

That was pretty much my thought about Mahalo when it launched - this has been tried before, by an outfit with a lot more resources - and abandoned. I could be wrong though - the real answer will make itself known soon enough - either people will start using Mahalo or they won't. Thus far, I haven't been motivated to do so - Google is still the default for me in Firefox's search box in the upper right corner. That has more to do with inertia than with any positive choice on my part, but inertia may well be the determining factor here.

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