Call it a search-engine curator

While Google has thousands of computers crunching complex algorithms to sift through the Web, Mahalo Inc. employs about 40 people to handcraft search results. The idea is to add a human touch to the highly automated process of helping people find what they're looking for online.

"Google indexes the world's information," Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis said. "We're curating the world's information."

Calacanis, an entrepreneur who has sold companies to AOL and Dow Jones & Co., knows that it's silly to try to unseat Google. Instead, he wants to siphon a small but lucrative part of the $6.8-billion U.S. search market that Google dominates by providing answers to only the most-popular queries, such as "Paris hotels" and "flat-panel TV."

Mahalo, named after the Hawaiian word for "thank you," has powerful financial backers, including News Corp., CBS Corp. and Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm that backed the likes of Google and Yahoo Inc. The company plans to make money through online ads.

Working out of a former factory on Colorado Avenue, Mahalo's "guides" have assembled pages for more than 4,000 search terms that they think people want most. They are aiming to complete 10,000 by the end of the year.

That's a far cry from Google, which indexes billions of Web pages to instantly return an almost-infinite number of results to queries as wide-ranging as "Norwegian wood instrument" and "wayward whales" -- terms that were not covered by Mahalo's guides as of Wednesday, when the firm launched an early version of its service. For results it doesn't offer, Mahalo links to the relevant answers on Google.

The reliance on people to organize the Web hearkens back to the early to mid-1990s, when Yahoo and others had employees sift through Web pages and assemble them into directories, said David Hallerman, analyst with EMarketer Inc. But the sheer size and constantly changing nature of the Web quickly made computers better suited for that task.

Ask.com, the search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves, for years tried using hundreds of editors to compile results but abandoned the approach in favor of computer code.

"We moved away from that specifically because we couldn't be accurate enough and comprehensive enough," Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Lanzone said. "Running a search engine is a very humbling experience because you realize very quickly how hard it is to do well."