Mahalo, the human powered search engine, surprised me very recently with their response to the tragic news of journalism-great Tim Russert’s passing.

I had heard the news via twitter before anywhere else, but there were zero details. Whatever work ethic I had gathered to finish daily tasks was now gone – replaced with clicking link after link searching for a full report. The same AP story came up across various news sites but I was more interested in hearing Tom Brokaw’s gallant effort to relay the information about his good friend. I wasn’t in a position to turn on a television so I just kept clicking the refresh button on MSNBC.com every minute or so hoping to see a new video clip.

I switched tabs back to twitter and saw that Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis was directing anyone interested in Russert information to the Mahalo page. I’d been to the site, but I’ll admit it was casual. I was certainly not expecting to find the most comprehensive list of links to a variety of different written and video. This was just 25 minutes after the story broke.

At that moment, I became a believer in people powered search — especially when gathering information about a breaking news story.

“We call that moment when people understand what we’re doing a ‘Mahalo moment,’” said Calacanis about my experience in an e-mail. “It happens at a different time for everyone. The longer guide notes with citations have really accelerated the number of Mahalo moments we’ve noticed.”

Calacanis was kind enough to reply to the e-mail about my experience and also answer few questions about the entire process of putting breaking news together at Mahalo headquarters…

Were you in the building when the Mahalo staff was assembling the information?

Yes,

How many people were working on Russert links?

When these big things break we have 2-5 folks “flood the zone.” FTZ means find every piece of information possible as quickly as possible, and do citations for each fact.

Our pages are search results with scannable wikipedia articles. The “Guide Note” might get you everything you know, or act as a jumping off point to do more research.

Was there any coaching on your part (or whoever was in charge at the time) during the link gathering stage? [And]—-What’s important during this process?

The team knows what their doing and we have a whole news department. They have CNN, Fox News, NPR, CNBC, etc. on in the office (we have eight satellite feeds in the office going directly to people’s computers).

When breaking news, such as this event, occurs, is there a “deadline-like” plan set in place? AND what does such a plan entail?

We just keep covering it until the event is over.

While breaking news is clearly a great example of the power of human powered search, it’s important to note that what we’re doing is really bridging the gap between journalism and search. We’re not going to replace Google, nor will we replace AP or Reuters. However, we might make a new service that is a better place to start for some types of searching or researching.

We are only one year old, but we have 4m unique visitors a month. In another 3-5 years we could have 50 or 100m [million] folks visiting our pages the same way Wikipedia and Google do.

-I’m convinced Mahalo is on to something.