Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google? Better search? Too subjective. Better monetization? After the fact. Better User Interface? Will we know it when we see it? A new and different search? Semantic? Human powered? We won't know till we know.

This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth. The following chart shows the weekly share of US Internet visits to Mahalo and Cha-Cha over the past six months.

New York - Internet entrepreneur Jason Calcanis, who founded the now-AOL-owned Weblogs, on Thursday debuted his latest venture, the alpha version of a new online search engine called Mahalo. The service uses a team of 40 expert guides who arrange search results based on relevance, placing the primary results in a "top 7" at the top. Users can also contribute to the search engine's effectiveness by submitting relevant links to various search terms. Mahalo currently counts about 4,000 results pages, based on the most popular search terms, and plans to reach 25,000 by the end of 2008, TechCrunch reported.