Jason Calacanis’ secret “Project X” has finally launched and it’s called Mahalo. It’s a human-powered search engine, meaning anyone can supposedly suggest helpful results for search keywords. And if your searches are good enough, you can get paid as a reward.

The interface, despite its pastel/Hawaiian/nature-loving look, seems to behave more like a highly customized wiki (MediaWiki, to be specific) than a search engine, even if this controversial blogger claims he’s got no plans of killing that website format, which, coincidentally, is also named after a Hawaiian word. In fact, the secondary goal of Mahalo is to help fund Wikipedia itself:

…So, you can make the world better 2x: first by making clean, spam- free search results and second by helping keep the Wikipedia running (those server bills ain’t cheap!).

We’ve earmarked up to $250,000 in donations to the Wikipedia this year.

Source: Mahalo Greenhouse Launches

Now that’s pretty kind for someone who declared war against the search engine optimization industry and got called all sorts of colorful names for it.

Web 2.0 Validator Score
5/65

The Formula
Foreign Word

Confirmed Etymology
“thank you”, “(May you be) in (Divine) Breath.”

Belongs to Circle Number
2, The Metaphor

Not to Be Consfused With
PayPerPost, Squidoo

Did You Know…
“…that Mahalo.com is a human-powered search engine whose lead investor Sequoia Capital helped start both Yahoo! and Google?”