It will probably only last a second or two. In the scheme of things it’s a relatively small shift of weight. There is no danger they’re going down, let alone for the count. But let’s enjoy it.

The New York Times and Jason Calacanis have found the Achilles’ heel and with some justice it’s deep in the heart. The Algorithm.

As fast and as smart as it is, it can and is gamed on a very consistent basis. Although the larger miracle of general quality and accuracy has created a brand image that overcome reality time and time again, and despite the irony that there has probably been more progress made to improve the results in the toughest spots in the past twelve months than in the previous five years, it still remains true that the more likely there is money attached to your search, or significant diversity surrounding its concept, the higher the probability that your results will NOT be the 10 most relevant in the world.

The fact that humans can do a better job isn’t really even an argument. The issue is speed and scale. The brilliance of what Jason is doing at Mahalo is the idea of taking on the top XXX thousand most popular searches and letting the algo’s have the rest. It’s still a bear of a task, in terms of coordinating and avoiding conflicts of interest (real or imagined), but the rise and domination of Wikipedia clearly says it’s not impossible.

A lot of the response from Matt Cutts sounds very defensive. ‘People turn on our computers, and people wrote and loaded the software…’ but in the end he seems genuinely open to having people edit results. That of course would be the smart thing to do, both functionally and competitively. Google could certainly arrange to have the top 10K results human edited in very short order. They don’t even have to make a big switch, just offer a tab at the top, or preference or alt search button (‘algo search’ vs ‘editor says’). Let users opt-in to these results when available, or switch to them when the machine is being out-witted by 100K spammers just out for their commissions.

It’s amazing how competition drives better results. And how a little press (mainstream or blog-o-based) magnifies the significance and pressure generated by anything. I have no doubt that the ‘human-assisted’ arguments inside of Google will heat up and make more headway tomorrow than they did last week. I’m also sure that Mahalo and lots of other competitors will be equally spurred on to leverage their progress into even greater success. And that’s good for all of us.