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The field of “human-powered” search engines already seems to be too crowded with Mahalo, Wikia Search, Sproose, and ChaCha (which has now decided to focus on the mobile search frontier). All of these, however, still use bots, algorithms or a staff in one way or another in order to function as desired.
Stumpedia, on the other hand, claims to be “human-powered” and actually seems to be the only such engine to be completely at the will of its users. It’s homepage states that this is a ”social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web” without depending “on bots, algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.”
With that said, Stumpedia has no guides to create result pages (as with Mahalo and ChaCha), and in fact, Stumpedia actually does not host any content pages and does not claim to be a content producer. Instead, users simply type in their search term(s) and the only results displayed are those that have already been submitted by other users. As of this writing, the service claims to already have more than 3,500 search terms indexed, 3,150 links, and approximately 600 users.
To test out how the service works, I searched for “online tv” and Stumpedia returned absolutely no results (as I was expecting). I then decided to take it upon myself to add some links (which required signing up for a free account), and now when a user searches for “online tv” results come up for Joost, Veoh.tv, Babelgum, Blinkx BBTV, Revision3 and Miro (as seen in the screenshot below).
The links that I added can now be voted on by other users with a Digg-style ranking system (thumbs up or down) which then helps determine the order of the returned results. This is a great idea, but it also leaves the system wide open to be abused by website owners or flooded with phishing links since there is no moderator to monitor listings. Luis Pereira, the founder and CEO of Stumpedia, has already mentioned, in an interview with The Next Web, that Stumpedia was started with “an open platform with the bare minimum essentials to get started” and that it is now being built up with the help of its community. “Keeping up with all the new feature requests our community is constantly recommending, and trying to implement them as quickly as possible is our biggest challenge.”
Hopefully this will mean that some sort of moderation will be added in the future, as this is necessary to keep the search engine spam-free. Human-powered results are good, but not all of those can be trusted considering how massive the issue of security on the internet has become.
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May 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I like how everything is controlled by the users and they are rewarded with points and top spots for their profile’s exposure.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Cool! Thanks for the info.
Your site seems to be a good resource for newbies like me. Thanks a lot!
Loraleigh Vance’s last blog post..How to Shake it like a Polaroid Picture!
May 17th, 2008 at 1:35 am
This sounds very interesting. People that have websites will like it because they can add their own. However, how many people will use it. I used to be a researcher and librarian and I learned and taught about search engines and as much as I got excited about every new search engine that come out, I still wind up using google almost all of the time out of habit.
Jennifer’s last blog post..Lostpedia, Whedonesque, Television without Pity, Office Tally, Galactica Sitrep and Ugly is In
May 17th, 2008 at 1:55 am
The sites that are being added to stumpedia are also getting indexed by google. It’s a great way to drive traffic and create backlinks for website owners. So even if you still use google out of habit you may still end clicking on a stumpedia search result. How many people actually use Wikipedia??? Google & other search engines dominate traffic drivers to Wikipedia.