Jason McCabe Calacanis is the founder of Mahalo.com. With Mahalo he tries to establish a new search engine based on user submitted search result pages. In order to motivate people to write search result pages Mahalo pays part time guides 10 to 15 USD. Part time guides who submit a search page result that is accepted by full time guides also get credited as the original writer of pages.

According to Theo Röhle of the University Hamburg (Germany) the commercial exploitation of advertising space has become the main task of search engine companies. In ‘Think of it first as an advertising system’: Personalisierte Online-Suche als Datenlieferaant des Marketings” (pdf) he analyses the elicitation of user data of search engines with a focus on personalized search.