Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, inc. and later Netscape fame has launched the Alpha version of Mahalo (Hawaiin for "thank you") billed as the worlds first human powered search engine. The Mahalo site reports that each search result is handcrafted by their "Guides". The advantage to human recommended results is that they are free of spam and the big bonus in my opinion is the addition of warnings to the search results. The guides have included a warning symbol next to search results to identify pages that are full of pop-ups, contain flash animation, take a long time to load, are really ugly, automatically load music, etc.. Also their is a symbol representing a Guide's Choice which indicates that the human who reviewed the site was particularly fond of this site.
I like the idea and I am sure it will be a hit if the Internet is patient enough, as the results are sparse at the moment, of course they are in alpha release and hey the web is a huge space! Fear not, if your Mahalo query does not return the link you are looking for they kindly forward your request to Google at the moment. I'll keep an eye on Mahalo but think I'll stick with Google, at least in the short term.
