It would seem that “mahalo” is also Hawaiian for “whoop ass.”

That may be the conclusion drawn by search aficionados after Mahalo’s debut Wednesday of a dramatic new search interface — one which incorporates the upstart company’s human-powered results with a tabbed display of eight additional services.

Mahalo is a different kind of web directory. When you enter a search at Mahalo, the site delivers a hand-picked menu of results curated by human editors. The idea is to take search out of the hands of computer algorithms, delivering results which are more relevant to the search. They’re also free of the spammy returns gamed by keyword-stuffing and all the modern tricks of the Search Engine Optimization trade.

Of course, the web is a big place, and Mahalo has only been around since May. Which means that unless you’re Bill Gates or Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, it’ll be a while before you can go ego-surfing on the new service. In the meantime, Mahalo has been delivering a pruned list of Google results when presented with queries not in its index.

Now, though, Mahalo has become something of a searcher’s power tool. Let’s try a search that’s not in Mahalo’s index.

Shocking as it may be, snarfd is nowhere to be found on Mahalo — even a full 48 hours after our launch. A terrible oversight. So here’s what you’ll get if you plug snarfd into Mahalo:

There’s the Mahalo interface and the company’s official apology for not yet getting around to snarfd, The Eclectic Compendium. No worries, Mahalo, we know you’re busy humanizing the search industry. Immediately below is the first of several syndicated Google results, similar to Mahalo’s previous offering.

But the beauty of Mahalo’s new interface is where you can go next:

Behind the Mahalo page, a click away, are the tabbed native results for eight major services: Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, Ask.com, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, YouTube, and Flickr. Not aggregated results: the real deal. You can drop out of Mahalo’s frame immediately, if you wish, or further refine your search from within the tabbed window. It’s a huge time-saver for data miners.

snarfd caught up with Jason Calacanis this afternoon to ask why Mahalo is making the change.

“We thought folks would want our related links and backed-up with syndicated Google or Yahoo,” said Calacanis. “However, power users complained the wanted real Google or real Yahoo as opposed to the syndicated result only version.”

So does the de-emphasis on syndicated results cost Mahalo money? Calacanis says it does.

“Yes, we lose revenue with this, but we give the people the best solution. Human: we’ve got it; a tabbed interface of every important service if we don’t,” explains Calacanis. “It’s the best of all worlds — and the bitter competitors in search will never link to each other.”

So what do with think around the snarfd office? After playing with the new results page for about an hour, I switched all my browser defaults to Mahalo. We’ll just have to assume there will be a snarfd page on Mahalo someday. In the meantime, it’s a pretty slick ride.