Today we’re talking about Mahalo. Mahalo is a human-powered search site headed up by Jason Calacanis that is designed to reduce spam and increase user experience. They do this by having a member of Mahalo view every site that the search engine picks up for specific keywords for integrity, topic eligibility, and whether or not the site is genuine. Once a site has been cleared it goes into the Mahalo search for eager surfers to partake.

More recently, a new feature called “My Mahalo” has been implemented that allows users to post reviews available to anyone within their social network in addition to being part of an overall average rating for whatever the topic may be. Underneath results for your search you will find user-recommended links related to the topic and user reviews from other Mahalo users.

This brings the social network aspect to a search engine in a new and interesting way. If you use the Mahalo tool bar, these reviews can be viewed in relation to other major search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo.

The website where you can check this search engine out is mahalo.com.