Jason Calacanis is a well known personality in the internet sector. He has done everything from running a newspaper during the original dot com boom, to founding blogging network Weblogs (which he later sold to AOL). His latest project is a human powered search engine called Mahalo (it’s Hawaiian for ‘thank you’).

Calacanis prepared for this launch by claiming that all who worked in SEO were snake-oil salesman (which obviously puts him high on my Christmas card list), although this particular rant was brilliantly rebutted by Danny Sullivan. Having got that out of his system he has launched Mahalo which aims to produce better results than automated search engines like Google & Yahoo! by hiring human editors to scour the web and hand-write the results pages.

You can try out Mahalo if you haven’t got anything better to do. All I’d like to add to the debate is this; I tried it out by searching for big brother (OK, I’m obsessed) and was met with the message:

Oops! We haven’t hand-written a result page for “big brother” yet

Further explanation stated:

• Mahalo is a human-powered search engine
• Our current goal is to hand-write result pages for the top 10,000 search terms
• To reach that goal we’re focusing on the most popular search terms first

OK, I though. That’s reasonable enough. Until I noticed that in the list of the top searches on Mahalo, #4 was taken by searches for…wait for it…. Jason Calacanis. Surely, if their aim were to concentrate on the top 10,000 search terms in order of popularity, they wouldn’t have a hand-written page for Jason Calacanis and not for the huge global TV sensation Big Brother would they? Of course they would.

This is what Google Trends thinks about the relative search popularities of Jason Calacanis & Big Brother in the US. I think that I’ll leave it at that.

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