Jason Calacanis, formerly of Weblogs, Inc and AOL, launched a new search engine a few hours ago called Mahalo. Although the site will tell you that it means thank you in Hawaiian. I already knew this because I've heard the Laurie Berkner song about a hundred times already. (It's my older son's favorite disc right now). I bet Steve Nelson knew it too, but he's frequently in a state of aloha.

Mahalo, the Web site, has a simple premise. Provide a page for each of the top 10,000 search terms. The information on the page is written an edited by a responsible person employed by the site. Robert Scoble suggested it was kind of like Yahoo! when Yahoo! was just a directory.

They are calling themselves a search engine, but I think it works more like Wikipedia, except you might have a bit more trust that the content is credible. I might go to Mahalo first if I were trying to look something up as if looking it up in an encyclopedia. I wouldn't use it to figure out how to use javascript to dynamically update the cascading styles on elements of an unordered list.

The top 10,000 search terms idea is interesting because it runs counter to the idea of a long tail. Google is very much oriented towards the long tail. It indexes lots of obscure stuff that only a few people care about. Jason's site only indexes the head and part of the neck. Or maybe it's just the forehead. I don't have a good idea of how many keyword phrases fit into the beast that is all things people search for on the Web.

I wonder where the top 10,000 search terms come from. It would be interesting if they paid attention to the terms people typed into their search box. It would be really interesting if people could do the equivalent of a google bomb by linking terms to pages that have yet to be written. For example, why isn't there a Leon Atkinson page?