For those of you who might not be aware of Mahalo – it is a “human edited” search engine. It’s goal is to provide spam-free search engine results that are deemed most valuable to the searchers as determined by a group of human editors. I’m not going to go into the whole background of Mahalo and the controversy stirred up by it’s founder Jason Calacanis – you can find plenty of that on almost every major SEO blog out there. There’s some pluses and minuses to the search engine, but in the end, they make a valiant stride at creating a spam-free search engine. So I agree with the goal, but the practicality of having a human edited search engine when Google estimates that 25% of searches have never been seen before, make it very hard, and in my opinion, unscalable, to capture a large market. However, they forge ahead, and have turned some heads along the way. But I’m not here to debate their methodology, the controversy, or the like – in my opinion a spam free search is a great goal, but the best way to get there is debatable.

Today, I did some quick searches in Mohalo to see just the quality of results that come up for certain phrases – and I don’t know if it was just me but it seemed awfully slow running a simple search – some queries took more than 10 seconds to load! But, moving forward, it became quickly apparent that Mahalo had some favorite sites that consistently made it’s top list for every query, amazon.com, eBay.com, wikipedia.com, etc. In doing some beer specific searches, I came across this section of their Guinness page for Guinness Merchandise: