Mahalo-human powered search

Recently a search engine "Mahalo" was launched in alpha version. Its claim to fame "Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine"

It makes use of "Guides" who are human to sort through content and remove spam. I came across a guide by name "Nicole Gustas" who has created as many as 227 results!! Converting that into google coop's will mean nearly 227 search engines.

The results are marked as "Warnings , Guide's Choice , and What is? icons". Although google coop does not allow for showing warnings sites can be excluded. "What is" seems to be an equivalent of the answer.com results shown in Google, may be slightly better.

The rules for selection are rather stringent..They don't want any sites that have too many advertisements, sites which are younger than one year and so on.You can find details at their FAQ.

I compared the result for the word "Advertorial" from Mahalo with that from google . Although the first result is from wikipedia in both, which reminded me of Search engine nightmare. The search refinements in Mahalo are rather unique, the refinements provided by google dont recognize the context as well as mahalo as they are "not human crafted". May be a better algorithm would do the job for google.

But how do they plan to generate money from this endure? by selling the search results to search engines or by ads or the other means?

I almost forgot you can create an account and add sites, suggest sites to be included for a particular result.A lot of similarity between mahalo and google coop.