Google announced today that it was building its own fiber optic cable to the trans-Pacific region, linking the United States and Japan. Neat!

The $300 million "Unity" project is a 10,000km linear cable system with 7.68 Tbps transmission capability.

Google's press release talks about the specific details. But the two things I find really interesting are:

A) Trans-Pacific bandwidth demand has grown over 60% over the last few years. That's a huge increase.

B) Google is moving to owning (and ultimately, I'm sure selling) infrastructure network capacity.

GoogleFi, Google's wireless network in Mountain View, was a testbed for something much larger, I'd guess.

It will be interesting to see how things progress with Google owning infrastructure and search.

A few months ago, I read an article in Fast Company magazine about Jason Calacanis and a new "human powered" search engine project he was funding. I thought it was a pretty interesting concept.

The idea is that, instead of using some new fancy computer algorithm to index the web, you simply use people. It isn't very high tech, but makes a lot of sense for topics that are important.

People can evaluate context and make subjective judgments about what are relevant and important web sites for a given topic. Computer software is great at crunching numbers and running algorithms, but not so good at making a judgment call.

There's not a ton of people-powered search indexing on Mahalo yet, but enough to give you an idea of where it's headed. The nice thing is, if there's not Mahalo indexing available, they've provided links to all of the major search engines, with your search topics already populated.

I harbor no illusion they'll even make a dent in Google's profits, but still, Calacanis has come up with what could be a very useful and profitable little search niche.