If you haven’t heard about mahalo.com, go have a look.  I personally don’t think much of it but I’m sure it has an audience.  Primarily it’s marketed as a human powered search engine.  So where Google relies on computations to rank web page search results mahalo gets people to make the same decisions.  i can see value in that as long as they have lots of humans (and I think they do).

What interested me tonight though was a search for ‘open office’ at Google, screen shot below.

What surprised me was the mahalo item at the top of the search results, and for a number of reasons:

• I see mahalo as a business venture.  It’s one organisations view on the what should be ranked, how and when.   It doesn’t represent the consensus at all.
• The mahalo block seemed to appear a second or two AFTER the actually search results.  I’m not sure if this is by design or something weird with FireFox 3 Bet 5, but it caught my attention too much.
• This to me is also an advertisement, although it doesn’t clearly state as much.
• They get a cool little flower icon appear next to their results.

Now it should be said that I’m not in competition with mahalo in any way, so I have nothing to gain from having a rant except to say that there must be some incredible deal between mahalo and Google to make this actually happen.

Normally Wikipedia appears at the top of these search results, a community driven non-profit, and as much as I don’t think much of the Wikipedia content at times I do recognise that that content is written by the people, you and I.

So how did mahalo get there?

Update: Just realised that this appears in my google search results only because I have installed a sharing addon for firefox… there’s an option for showing the mahalo top 7 in the results. Why didn’t I see it before now I wonder.