Mahalo, the “human powered search engine”, announced this week that they will be integrating CC BY-NC licensing into their search index, making the content reusable for noncommercial purposes.

While APIs have often allowed developers access to a website’s back end, Mahalo utilizes more than algorithms to generate their index. Users sift through and moderate search results, in the words of Mahalo “curating” what search engines like Google spit out. Mahalo pay users for this task, “$15 each to write a search page result and another $5 to $10 for someone else to edit it in a self-correcting quality control system”, and have exceeded their original goal of 10,000 results for this year by 15,000, putting them a year ahead of schedule.

It are these “human curated” results that Mahalo is licensing, which bring with them added value and investment from Mahalo’s standpoint. By using a CC license that retains their commercial rights to this content, but similarly allows interesting and creative reuses of it for non-commercial purposes, Mahalo contributes a valuable resource to the online community as a whole. It will be interesting to see how Mahalo develops over the coming months, especially in the way their search index will be reused by the Mahalo community.

In related news, Mahalo Daily, Mahalo’s video blog, recently interviewed CC’s Creative Director Eric Steuer, in which he gives a general introduction of CC and drops an on the fly remix of a CC licensed music (T. Pain included).