Mahalo, a human-powered search, is tearing down its editorial walls to follow Wikipedia’s model of user generated and edited content. Mahalo has placed some regulations still while in transition, as explained by Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo.  

…it’s not going to be as freewheeling as Wikipedia day one. We’ve got three major differences:

1. You have to register and be logged in to edit a Guide Note. This is a major throttle on people contributing since the signup process takes a couple of minutes and an email address.
2. Our staff is going to check every edit made and confirm it is correct. We have three full-time folks on this right now and our expectation is we will only get 10-50 editors per day.
3. You can edit your own pages, or a page about your company. Our thinking is since we’re checking all the facts that’s an OK thing to do. (Wikipedia does not let you edit your own page).

Mahalo’s goal is to help users navigate the web quickly with 50% content and 50% curated links.

Mahalo.com is a human powered search application; as opposed to Google’s computer algorithm search method. In this example, I use (1) Mahalo Follow to recommend a link. The link gets posted to del.icio.us, Twitter, and ma.gnolia automatically. The link is also indexed in my (2) Mahalo Social page, which I can further recommend to other friends. Then I do a (3) Mahalo Search to simulate the search term I recorded in step 1. It’s a simple process. Mahalo’s growth depends on the number of people iterating the process.

[1] Install the Mahalo Follow

[1.1] Select a web page to recommend

[1.2] Recommend the page by clicking on “Yes” in Mahalo toolbar. Encode search term, tags, notes, and share links to del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and Twitter.

[2] Recommended link will be displayed in your Mahalo Social page, where you can view your recommended links and your friends’ recommended links.

[3] You can view the recommended link by doing Mahalo Search