Austin-based AntStorm is launching it’s unique human-powered search site today. The website is kind of a combination of the social bookmarking of del.icio.us and the human powered search of Mahalo, with a charitable twist.

The metaphor for AntStorm is a powerful one. Individually, an ant can’t do a whole lot, but as a group they can take down a steer and clean it to the bone. Individual ants mark their trails with pheremones, so that other ants can find their way to food. So it is with individual users of AntStorm who mark and annotate their search trails so that others can find the best information on the internet easily. The screenshot below shows a sample nest. Each nest can be public or private, and can have many trails, and each trail can have many links.

There are some cool features of AntStorm that make nests self-regulating. If someone suggests a new member to add to the group, the new member gets voted upon by existing members. If a new link link in a trail gets added, it also gets voted in or out. So nests are human-powered information collections.

Public nests, trails, and links are search optimized and search is still the leading use for context sensitive advertising. Public pages utilize Google AdWords, and revenue is shared with non-profit organizations of the users choice. There are 1.5 million charities listed, and users can allocate ad revenue by percentage to several different charities.

David Wilson is the President and co-founder of AntStorm. Many of his insights into what makes for a market-leading information resource comes from his background at companies like VIEO, United Devices, and Deja.com where he was President & COO. “Building a terrific human-powered search engine is not so much a technology challenge as it is a matter of aligning the right authoring model, incentive system and content architecture, and combining them into a compelling user experience,” he told us. “The elegant aspect of our approach is that the search engine content is a natural byproduct of social bookmarking activities that are compelling and rewarding to users in and of themselves.”

Wilson continued: “Our expectation is that it will take three to five years to build a sufficient critical mass of content to become a legitimate human-powered search engine. But during that time, our users will find that our unique social bookmarking services enable them to help themselves, help others and help their favorite charities – all while discovering and accessing resources on the Web about their favorite topics in new and exciting ways.”