The thing that pisses me off about Mahalo is that Calacanis goes around claiming it's some type of innovative idea/technology and that everything thing they do is for the benefit of the users. It's a straight SEO play, along the lines of About.com. Everything they do is to increase Mahalo's search traffic! Just look at the widget mentioned in that article. Does anyone really want that set of links on their blog? Does it really help anyone? And all of Jason's friends on the blog circuit still give Mahalo good press...
All this really shows is that there should be several completely independent ways of ranking search results which alternate so that it will never pay off to try to scam them all because the ROI is too small.<p>Gaming the google ranking system is only effective because of the monoculture.
While this seems like shady tactics from Mahalo, it also seems to suggest the need for a better (read: less game-able) ranking system than PageRank. There's now tons more data about which sites users visit for a given query, whether they return to the results page, how much time they spend on a site, etc. If you can sift through the noise, it seems like this would be an even more accurate indicator of site quality than hyperlinks to a page.
Its kinda funny, if some guy did the same exact thing to increase page rank for his blog, Google would come down on them hard the second they found out. Mahalo on the other hand gets a free pass