People Power
A New Search Engine Using People 
While the Internet’s major search engines keep adding more computers to scan the Web and run increasingly sophisticated algorithms to pull up meaningful results, dot-com luminary Jason Calacanis thinks there is still a place for people power. Backed by a group of investors with impressive track records, Calacanis is putting his theory to the test with Mahalo.com — a stripped-down search engine ready to handle the most popular requests in widely appealing categories.Mahalo, which Calacanis unveiled Wednesday at a technology conference in California, relies on about 40 employees to track down the best responses to some of the Web’s most repeated requests. The findings are narrowed to a series of lists pointing to the most helpful Web sites. “Just like a lot of people who watch movies think they can be scriptwriters, there are a lot of people who use search engines who think they can build a search engine,” Lanzone said. “Until you are on the other side of the wall, you will never understand just how difficult it is. On any given day, 60% of the search requests we get, we have never seen before.”
