Seems to be plenty of existing ways to accomplish this. Not clear there is a market (not a big one anyway) for yet another one.

While I’m intrigued by Mahalo’s new project, I wonder if there is truly any value in turning the Web into a call center.

What sites like these do is devalue the research skills we all learned in college (like math, the things we learned in the library were intended to have real-world value!) You are right to be skeptical of whether people will pay money for this service. It’s one thing to pay a doctor money, or pay to play World of Warcraft. It’s quite another to pay a stranger over the Internet, even if their advice is sound.

But people want answers quickly, and these sites are apparently the only (Web-based) way to get them. It’s awfully hard now to convince people that doing their own (question-mark-free) research, involving poring over pages of search results using a variety of search engines, would yield better results.