Mahalo - the human search engine

From Read Write Web

Mahalo is a human-edited search engine that focuses only on popular search queries. Right now Mahalo has 8,800 pages, on what Jason calls "Fat Tail" search queries.The fat Tail is also the most competitive search area, for search engines as well as the hundreds of thousands of content creators who want to rank on the first page in Google for popular search queries.

Mahalo is launching a new Firefox toolbar, which displays a sidebar every time you do a search on a popular query in Google and other major search engines with Mahalo results. But the Mahalo toolbar is kind of annoying from a UI perspective. Having the sidebar pop up every time I search for something (including in Gmail!) quickly got tiresome.

Mahalo is also releasing a "synchronous search" feature called Mahalo Follow - which reads the keywords on the page. For example a search on "digital camera" displays these keywords: cameras, digital, models, new, camera, resolution, megapixels, small, zoom, electronics, ratings, take, health, our, few, range, buying, image, lens, slrs.