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Jason Calacanis’ new project Mahalo is up and running, the goal of which is to “hand-write the top 10,000 search terms.” There are 40 Mahalo employees writing search results today – they have 4,000 results written now and hope to have 10,000 by the end of the year. The top 10,000 searches apparently account for 1/4 of search engine queries and the majority of search advertising. Calacanis has raised enough money to “run his company for four years with no revenue.“

OK. I’m sure if you were to ask Calacanis he would say that the big difference between this project and sites like Yelp and Wikipedia is that only the certified guides craft Mahalo results. This means that for Mahalo to be successful, there is some advantage to paying 40 people to do what tens of thousands of people intimately familiar with a vast array of subjects will do for free. I don’t see it. Maybe I’ll eat my words on this one. Sequoia, News Corp, and Elon Musk can’t all be wrong, can they? That said, I do understand why they’ve chosen a Hawaiian theme with their design and logo: surfing sells.