Everyone’s been talking about how the social graph is the next evolution of search. Search 4.0. The next step forward after Search 3.0’s blended and personalized search. Today, Mahalo is taking that next step and adding a social layer to their search results. Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder, says that the problem of search will be solved by a combination of machines, human curation, and social interaction, and with today’s launch of Mahalo Social, Mahalo adds the beginning of that elusive social interaction. The new features include profiles and the ability to recommend links for search terms. Much like Digg or Delicious, users can add friends and see what those friends are recommending. Below, more information on how Mahalo plans to deal with spam, work with webmasters, and if this approach will scale.

Jason acknowledges that Mahalo is a content site rather than a search engine. 30% of the site is editorially generated by their staff, but it’s presented in a search context. Mahalo contains about 26,000 pages so far and Jason says they’ll never cover the long tail of search. But he does think they’ll catch up with the amount of content on Wikipedia, and within five years should be covering up to half of what people are searching for. (Don’t worry Jason, it’s mostly Britney Spears and sex. And I see you’ve got those two subjects covered.)

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