Jason Calacanis and Star-Studded Investor Team Launch Mahalo, Human-Powered Search

Outspoken, thoroughly outrageous, endearing, occasionally obnoxious, and always clever serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a human-powered search engine whose name is Hawaiian for "Thank you."

Calacanis was CEO of Weblogs, Inc. which was purchased by AOL/TW for a reported $30 million; CEO of Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and Venture Reporter; which was purchased by Dow Jones for an undisclosed amount.

While it's not the first or only human-powered search engine, Mahalo's investors are certainly an impressive group, including Sequoia Capital, Mark Cuban, Newscorp, CBS Corporation and Burda Media.

Mahalo is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet's 4,000 most popular search terms completed, according to the company press release, which was released online this afternoon and embargoed for print until tomorrow. Heh!

The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter. "We're in month five of a five-year project," explained Calacanis.

Previous human powered search engines include ChaCha, blog-based Bessed - The Human Powered Search Engine, Wikia Search, and the grandaddy of them all, The Open Source Project, among others.

Congratulations Jason!!!

via Steve Rubel Twitter post

This is similar to mahalo - http://en.dabu.pl

However, it is more extended in polish version - http://dabu.pl