While this seems like shady tactics from Mahalo, it also seems to suggest the need for a better (read: less game-able) ranking system than PageRank. There's no

While this seems like shady tactics from Mahalo, it also seems to suggest the need for a better (read: less game-able) ranking system than PageRank. There's now tons more data about which sites users visit for a given query, whether they return to the results page, how much time they spend on a site, etc. If you can sift through the noise, it seems like this would be an even more accurate indicator of site quality than hyperlinks to a page.