Jason Calacanis has launched his highly anticipated search engine Mahalo today. Rather than have software run around the Internet, determining what a particular website is about and what terms should return that site as a result, Mahalo employs a team of actual people who determine search results.

Jason says the top 100,000 search terms account for 24% of all searches. If Mahalo can generate great results for these terms they can become the “place to go” for standard search queries. For those obscure searches, Mahalo serves up Google results, which may lead Mahalo to becoming a sort of front-end to Google (”give me some hand-picked results, but if you can’t - I’ll take Google”).

The result Mahalo returns for Google are concise but there is just something about them that makes me read right over them (maybe ad blindness thinking they are Sponsored Results?). One nice thing Mahalo does is expand upon certain results they may confuse users. For example, a link to a Technorati page concerning a particular website feature a “What is?” icon that will explain exactly what Technorati is to the user.

I don’t see Mahalo proving useful to the techies in the world - who are pretty stuck on using Google for the moment. But, Mahalo could really prove to be a useful feature for the elder generation, that tends to get lost when really trying to find information. For example, a search for mortgage on Mahalo returns some pretty amazing results including Bankrate, MSN Money, and Quicken Loans. Google returns result after result of spam and calculators (Wikipedia was in there as well, a decent result).