I recently talked about the launch of guide-based search Mahalo. One of the biggest unanswered questions was just how Jason Calacanis was planning to acquire the masses of data one would need to have a purely user edited search engine. It looks like we have found the answer, crowdsourcing.

Starting today, Mahalo Greenhouse has launched as yet another way to get paid to do something that we already spend far too much time doing for free — searching.

How It Works

All you need to do to get involved is to go to Mahalo and apply to become a part time guide, once you are accepted as a guide you find a search topic that you want to write about and create the best result that you can come up with. If your result is picked up by one of the full-time guides, you are paid somewhere between $10-$15.

The pay scale is determined by the number of entries that you create that are later accepted by the guides.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I need to hear more before I sign off on this as a valid way to earn a few extra bucks. It does, however, answer a few nagging questions about Mahalo. If this takes off, Jason might be able to surpass his stated goal of indexing the top 10,000 searches. Imagine hundred of thousands of crowd-sourced, editor vetted search results — what an interesting world that would be.

What do you think the future of search looks like? Is purely user edited the best we can get?

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