Mahalo is opening up a new microeconomy (if it works) by accepting submissions and paying for them with Mahalo Greenhouse
I think the metaphor for Mahalo is pretty fluid, and possibly will solidify as some kind of wiki-nomic system and not search once its all done. Earlier Calacanis was of the opinion that he did not want to be a destination, but a search site, but I think the search metaphor is failing. For me I'm sure that's the case - search works mentally as a universal blank slate kind of interface - when universality goes, so goes the search feeling.

It's interesting that Calacanis did user testing, not of Mahalo but of the big search engines, in prep for Mahalo. I still feel as if Mahalo wouldn't help me with the kind of spam problem Google arguably has these days. I'm probably professionally biased in that direction, but what I want is just better filtering on what I know is the full index.