So Jason Calacanis is back in the start-up game with a human-powered search engine called Mahalo. First impressions: it reminds me of the early days of Yahoo when its search engine index was put together manually. The difference is Mahalo wants to build its index through crowd-sourcing. No one could ever accuse Calacanis being shy given this comment:

“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.”

Mahalo has raised two rounds of financing from a group that includes: Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, News Corp., CBS, Hubert Burda Media, Allen & Co., David Bradley, Gigi Brisson, Sandy Climan, Mark Cuban, Matt Coffin, Ted Leonsis, Jonathan Miller, Mark Pincus, Ryan Scott, and Fred Wilson.