Mahalo, Mahalo Nui Loa

Mahalo is Hawaiian for “thank you.” It is sometimes accompanied by the phrase nui loa, which is an intensifier meaning “very much.”

Interestingly, Mahalo is also the name of a new directory launched by Jason Calacanis. Though they call it a search engine, I think of Mahalo as a directory of static pages written by homo sapiens (and not search bots).

Fred, who’s an investor in Mahalo, says:

When Jason first described the idea to me, he said he was going to combine wikipedia, weblogs inc, and google.

The concept behind Mahalo is similar to the DMOZ project of Google but limited to the most popular search queries on the web. Do they pick this data from Google Trends or Google Zeitgeists ?