So, you may have heard about Jason Calacanis‘ little project call Mahalo recently. Mahalo is, as described on their site, “…a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms”. That certainly sounds like something fresh off a press release doesn’t it? The term people-powered is something that is either going to get you really excited or it’s going to turn you off to an idea and cause you to discount it as useless. We all learned from Wikipedia that people-powered can sometimes rock, but sometimes really suck too (like when assholes decide to vandalize entries to the point where they are useless).

Anyway, I have been using Mahalo off and on since it was first release and I’ve decided that it doesn’t suck, for the most part. Far from it actually, if used correctly it can be a powerful research tool and a great source for finding relevant information very quickly. So here are my top 5 reasons why Mahalo doesn’t suck:

1. Not Everyone Can Edit

It’s been that way since it started a few months ago and it seems to be going pretty well. Instead of just letting everyone edit entries, Mahalo entries are written by a group of “full-time guides” that write the majority of the posts on Mahalo. Their job is to find results and information on the entries on Mahalo. The way they are able to do this is that they are not trying to write every article at once, instead they focus on the top 20,000 search terms at any given time. I guess the idea is that eventually they will have most of what you are looking for there. There about 40 employees currently working full-time at Mahalo.

2. Mahalo Greenhouse

Mahalo realized that they might need some help writing all of the entries so they introduced the Mahalo Greenhouse. This allows anyone who wants to help to sign up and start writing entries. If the full-time guides like the entries they’ll put them up on the site. Oh, and did I mention that these “part-time guides get paid? It’s about $10-$15 per entry accepted.

3. Mahalo Follow

OK, so this one isn’t so great, but I’m including it because it has the potential to be something great. Mahalo Follow is an interesting little FireFox plugin does three things for you. First, it puts Mahalo right into your FireFox toolbar (is that what it’s called?), which will hopefully get users to use Mahalo more instead of going right to Google Search (though, if I’m not mistaken, you can replace Google with Mahalo in the built in search box, as well as use it as use it for search with the Inquisitor plugin for Safari). Second, It gives you a “Random Search” button that acts like StumbleUpon, but for Mahalo Search results. Finally, it gives you a side bar that shows summaries of search results based on keywords on whatever web page you happen to be on. That last one is the one that I have an issue with. It doesn’t work very well right now, I’ve found the results it gives to be totally useless in most cases, but it’s obvious that if Mahalo tweaked it a bit, and made it provide results that were more relevant, then Mahalo Follow would be a pretty great plugin.

4. Useful How Tos

A rather new thing on Mahalo are How To pages. These pages mix relevant links with good information and media from around the web to create informative How Tos. There are not a lot of them right now, but topics range from “How to Deep Fry Anything” to “How to Cure a Hangover”. This is probably my favorite part of the site. If you would like to see all of the How Tos you can right here.

5. Mahalo Daily

Mahalo Daily is a video podcast that is set to start very soon, that will be hosted by Veronica Belmont. It’s basically going to be about…um… well everything. Mahalo hasn’t really said much about the show other than the idea is that it will cover the searches that were recently popular on Mahalo, and not just technology as many of Veronica Belmont’s fans were expecting given her techie background and previous employment at Cnet. While the show hasn’t officially started yet, you can see a little preview of what it will be like here.

There you have it, there are a bunch of other really cool things about Mahalo, but I’ll let yo find those on your own. I’m not telling you that you should say “Fuck You!” to Google, Mahalo isn’t even saying that, all I’m asking is that you give this site a chance before you judge. Also, if you hate Jason Calacanis, just stop reading his blog and ignore that he has any involvement in the site.