Jason Calacanis chose the venue of the Wall Street Journal's D Conference to announce the launch of his Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine.
At launch the company has 4,000 of the most used search terms completed in the Alpha stage, with the goal of reaching 10,000 at the end of the year, according to their press release. At that time the project will enter Beta.
Responding in the Q&A section of the press release page concerning if this was an attempt at being a Google killer, Calcanis responded: "...head-to-head Mahalo's human-powered search results will be much better than Google's machine-created results—when we do have a result. My feeling is that ultimately people will use Mahalo for popular search terms, and machine-based search engines like Google and Yahoo! for long-tail searches."
The site will be built around the most frequently used search terms in the English language. Calacanis added, "Google's mission is to index the world's information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index. It's my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we're going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years."
Niche topics like news, sports, travel, entertainment and health, among others, will be included mix. The premise is to have only high value links appear for the desired 
searches, eliminating the time spent sifting through irrelevant results.
Investors in the initiative include Elon Musk, News Corp. (NWS-A), Sequoia Capital, Burda Media and CBS Corporation (CBS-A).
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