Mahalo, backed by Jason Calacanis, has now gone live in an early "Alpha" test release. In Mahalo, human editors have crafted shows up in the top search results for popular queries.

Penny-wise, Calacanis is optimistic he has things covered. "We have 40 people working on it in Santa Monica and will have 100 by the end of the year. We think we can control the costs," he said. "We can actually make enough money to keep this going. The goal of the site is not to be a comprehensive search engine. We're very comprehensive for the most popular search terms. After that, we give the others over to Google or Yahoo," Calacanis said.

Give over to Google or Yahoo? Two explanations are given by Calanis. First, Jason doesn't expect that the people-powered search engine backed will be used instead of a major search engine like Google or Yahoo. In its place, he hopes it will become a tool people selectively tap into when they want answers for a common, popular subject. He expects those looking to do hard-core research or a hunt after unusual information to turn to a traditional search engine.

"I don't think it's possible for people to abandon them," Calanis said. "It's not the goal to wipe out Google or be the first choice. Google is the new ocean. You are much better to work with them. We don't see them as competitive. We've got 4,000 search terms, we're not going to replace them, we know that. But if you compare any of these terms, it's better to start with us," he said.

Overall, Mahalo aims to cover 25,000 top search terms. Approximately, 4,000 have been created already, and the goal is to do 500 per week scaling up to 1,000 per week. This takes into account revisiting and updating existing terms.