The great thing about mixing it up with the SEO crowd is that they prove your point over and over and over again... first they tried to kidnap my search result on Google, now they are buying adwords to attack Mahalo (do a search for Mahalo.com on Google and you'll see ads like the one below).

The more SEOs fight you the more you know you're doing the right thing for the average web user. SEO is going to be looked at as a footnote in the history of the internet and search--a time we'll want to forget.

For more childish SEO behavoir check here.

We have an interesting discussion starting over at Facebook:

What would you do next if you were CEO of Mahalo?

Feel free to post here, but would rather see the debate over there.

Kevin Rose dugg us!! http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Mahalo_We_re_here_to_help
Today my team launched our latest project Mahalo.com. It's a human-powered search engine. We've already completed the top 4,000 search terms on the Internet and we hope to do 10,000 by the end of the year.

Our Mission: To help people.... a lot.

Please take a look at our results and compare the ones we have side by side with machine powered search by folks like Google, Ask, Yahoo, Technorati, AOL, and MSN. I think you'll find that humans can really help make search results better.

Feedback is not only welcome, I'm begging you for it! That's the whole point of our ALPAH: Tell us how to make search suck less! We're listening and we want to help... in fact, our tag line is "We're here to help!" The comments below are open so have at it, or post your thought to your own blog and I'll link to your comments (keep them constructive of course).

Here's the press release for today's launch, which took place at the Wall Street Journal's D Conference (thank Kara and Walt for including me in such an amazing event!). It also has details of our funding including our lead investors Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, and Newscorp.

You'll probably be able to find some more feedback on the Mahalo project at these links over the next two days:

Google Blog Search
Technorati Blog Search
TechMeme
Google News
and at http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo_press_coverage

If you're with the media, a blogger, or podcaster and would like to schedule an interview please feel free to email media at mahalo dot com.

A friend of mine sent me to a cool meta-search engine which looked just like the ones I'd seen back in the late 90s and I thought to myself "these are illegal right?"

Anyway, I looked up Google Terms of Service and it seems very clear:
http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

• No Automated Querying
  You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things:
  * using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries;
  * "meta-searching" Google; and
  * performing "offline" searches on Google.
  Please do not write to Google to request permission to "meta-search" Google for a research project, as such requests will not be granted.

I pinged my pal Danny Sullivan and he pointed me to the EBAY vs. Bidders Edge case and the fact that metasearch has rarely gone to court.

Of course, it feels really unfair to use three people's resource to make your own--at least without their permission.

More:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-519959.html
http://legal.web.aol.com/decisions/dldecen/ebay.html
http://pub.bna.com/lw/21200.htm
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/4_302591

I love how the same ideas come around in different forms every four years as something new in our industry. :)