A few months ago, I read an article in Fast Company magazine about Jason Calacanis and a new "human powered" search engine project he was funding. I thought it was a pretty interesting concept.

The idea is that, instead of using some new fancy computer algorithm to index the web, you simply use people. It isn't very high tech, but makes a lot of sense for topics that are important.

People can evaluate context and make subjective judgments about what are relevant and important web sites for a given topic. Computer software is great at crunching numbers and running algorithms, but not so good at making a judgment call.

There's not a ton of people-powered search indexing on Mahalo yet, but enough to give you an idea of where it's headed. The nice thing is, if there's not Mahalo indexing available, they've provided links to all of the major search engines, with your search topics already populated.

I harbor no illusion they'll even make a dent in Google's profits, but still, Calacanis has come up with what could be a very useful and profitable little search niche.