Let’s me work backwards….

4. New Sites: We find new sites two main ways:

a) Proactive: We have 50 filltime folks and 800 part-time Guides right now. Each of them specializes in a particular area or two. So, in sports we have 30-40 folks, and in food or science we have 20-30 for example. These folks are reading all the top blogs, news sources, delicious, reddit, digg, Netscape, etc. for their particular topics–DAILY! When new sites come up they find out about them. These folks also talk to each other constantly.

b) Reactive: It is very clear how to get our attention: submit you site for any search term! Thousands of folks are doing this every month already. Users can submit sites to us all day long…. in fact, we’ll see one site owner submit their pages for 20 different related search engines. Getting our attention is, in fact, EASY!

In fact, it is much easier to get our attention than Google or Yahoo’s. Those folks don’t talk to you about your position on the SERP–we will!

3. Bias: This is a big issue, but like Wikipedia or a newspaper we have an NPOV rule and we enforce it and police it religiously. Take a look at a page like George Bush or abortion and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, I would challenge you to find one piece of bias on the site…. if you do I’ll buy you a beer for each one!

Second, our site is 100% transparent. You can see the history of each page and every edit is done a by a real person with a real name getting paid real money. If someone does something biased we will find out and they will be fired. It’s that simple. We have an easier time with this than say Wikipedia because we have a paid relationship with our Guides/editors–and they don’t want to lose the paid relationship.

Third, every page has a message board where we will publicly debate any bias.

So, again, find me one example of bias in the 9,200 pages we have right now and the beer(s) are on me!

2. Momentum: This is actually probably wrong. In the end the better product usually wins on Internet. In fact, Google is the prefect example of this. They were 10-30% better than other search engines and they slowly took marketshare away from folks. So, in fact, if you are better you should get people to move. Remember there is zero lockin on the Internet. People can switch from search engine to search engine easily with no cost (switching social networks? ok, there is a cost there… you have to rebuild your network).

1. We actually do syndicate machine search already… so, we really don’t have to have everything…. we need to have enough so that you consider using us in addition to Google or Yahoo. In fact, if we can get just 1% of searches that is, as folks have pointed out, a very significant business. Additionally, we have 9,200 pages right now that service 20+ searches each… we did 700 pages last week. We are in our third month…. do the math, this could get big quick!

Anyway, I totally think you nailed the key issues and in fact your key issues are EXACTLY what the VCs said to me when we were raising money for the company… so, at the very least a) you’ve got a career ahead of you in venture capital and b) I’ve got a lot of work to do!

Mahalo for thinking of us and come back to the site every 60 days I suggest… it seems to change radically at that pace.

Also, I might suggest trying out Mahalo Follow… our toolbar/sidebar for Firefox that only opens when we have a human crafted result: http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/Special:FollowDownload?id=9

This would seem to be true:
If you’ve not built results for a particular query, it’s either going to be blank, they’re going to have to syndicate results from a true search engine, or they’re going to have to build their own true search engine.
However, Mahalo staff are very creative and have dome up with an even sillier alternative: show apparently random results. You can see a screen shot of the search results I got. Evidently, a particular type of increase in knitting is related to “Gay Marriage” and “Asteroids”. You can see the screen shot of Mahalo search results here.