Dave Naylor has fired a shot across Mahalo’s bow this morning.  Aftervote is similar to Mahalo insofar as it is a search engine whose SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) have a social influence component.

Dave claims Aftervote is inherently superior  however for a number of reasons including:

They have a few editors, we have 1000’s

If Aftervotes doesn’t have SERPs for a query, it defaults to meta search not only Google

Aftervotes offers a unique voting power wherein users can vote a site up or down with the click of a button

There is a radar logo by each result that is color coded to give you some info on it’s popularity;

Blue means one of your friends voted on the site
Red means someone in your ‘group’ voted for it
Black means that a listing is the consensus best choice

The size of the colored radar logo is indicative of the general popularity of the site.

I think using social data to influence SERPs is an interesting and logical innovation to add to the idea of ‘search’.  However, I do think it has to be carefully and cautiously implemented.  As we’ve seen illustrated lots of times with sites like Digg and del.icio.us there exists the potential of a pronounced downside on relying on ‘everyone’ for relevant information.