Attention Bandit

I'm a reluctant follower of Jason Calacanis on Twitter. I find his constant self-promotion of Mahalo to be a little over-the-top. However, he's an important voice in the tech community, so I haven't stopped following him (yet). Like any entrepreneur worth his salt, he's persistent and I finally saw the value of Mahalo when I read and clicked the following tweet:

Gentleman, I give you the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue... to an absurd level! : http://tinyurl.com/2mt8hd

As a red-blooded male, the subject matter obviously appealed but I have to admit that Mahalo's results are pretty compelling. For instance, a Google search for "2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue" yields this page, while the Mahalo results look like this. Now it might be a matter of opinion but it looks to me like Mahalo has turned up a better collection of links in a better organized product. For example, on 2/15/08 the 4th result on Google is a link to the digg listing for Google's 5th link, essentially making 4th and 5th link the same. Additionally, Mahalo's use of video and image embeds make for a pretty engaging product, especially when searching for swimsuit models!

Yet, this surprised me. I had previously discounted the effectiveness of human powered (or social) search due to my experience with del.icio.us. While I'm a huge fan of del.icio.us for personal bookmarking, their search engine has never consistently turned up novel results for me. Occasionally, I would uncover something unique and useful but there is always a lot of noise.

Maybe Mahalo has cracked that code. I haven't fully considered the economics of human edited search results and the breadth of information on Google is obviously superior, but it looks like Mahalo may be the next place I turn when Google fails to find what I'm looking for.