Human beings will replace search engines?

Posted by Jim Stroud

June 5, 2007

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’s 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 geared to handle the most popular requests in widely appealing categories like travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports.

Mahalo, which Calacanis unveiled Wednesday at a technology companies in Southern California, relies on about 40 employees to track down the best responses to some of the Web’s most repeated requests. The findings are boileddown to a series of lists pointing to the most helpful Web sites.