Stumpedia: A New, Human-Powered Search Engine
Are the results you receive when conducting a search using Google, Yahoo, MSN and a myriad of other search engines leaving a lot to be desired? Are the relevant results buried beneath irrelevant splogs and paid-for results? Stumpedia hopes to change all that.
Human Powered?
If my memory serves me correctly, Yahoo had the first human-powered search engine. It was their humans doing all the work, based on submissions from the public. This was before other companies developed search engine spiders which could crawl and index websites without human intervention. The Yahoo search engine was really nothing more than a searchable directory, much like the Open Directory Project is today.
Stumpedia appears to be somewhere in between, but without a directory and without spidering any websites. Members submit links with keywords and they're added to a searchable index — searchable by the keywords that members submit with the links.
Relevance
When I last checked, Stumpedia had a mere membership number of 1098. This is an insanely low number for this kind of service. I've seen many blogs with more RSS subscribers than that. Stumpedia has been around since January (a mere 4 months, give or take a week). I suspect it isn't heavily marketed and I'm merely guessing that based on the number of members and the infrequent updates on the blog that supports it.
The relevant results from this search engine, and how high or low they are in the results, is wholly dependent on the members. Each search result can be voted up or down. Search engine spamming will be incredibly futile in this kind of environment, but I'm sure some unscrupulous individuals will try it.
Features
You can submit links to your social bookmarks, social profiles, blogs, news stories, authoritative articles, images, videos, and web pages.
You can get instant answers. It's like instant messaging meets Yahoo! Answers. Chat in real-time. You can even answer questions if you install a plug-in for Windows or Mac OS X.
There are a lot of features I haven't explored yet. For instance, I don't know what the meaning is behind the points system.
Recommendations
This isn't a real review. I haven't had the time to go through each feature enough to write a real review. I've submitted two of my blog posts and one blog page, just to see how it works. It won't be until I submit a lot of posts that I'll be able to determine how effective the service is.
In my opinion, this is something you need to take a look at and experiment with. If you avoid the temptation to use irrelevant keywords, I think it may pay off in the long run. A lot of people are becoming dissatisfied with the algorithmic results produced by the big players in the search engine game and this kind of search engine may be where they end up heading.
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That's pretty cool, but it seems like they're just trying to gain off Wikipedia's success by letting anyone submit content. While it is different from wikipedia, it's somewhat similar when it comes to factual information about events, people, places, and things.
It's mixing it up though by letting people submit social profiles
Dean’s last blog post… What is new about the NEW line of Linear Ball type XY-Stages?
Riding the coattails of successful enterprises is the way a lot of businesses start and this one isn't any different than that.
Is this really different from Mahalo; Jason Calacanis' human driven search engine?
The Mahalo search engine is supervised by staff to make sure the results are relevant. The results for this one are voted on by members.
Hey, another good alternative….nothing wrong with that and it isn't like Wikipedia because it's an offshoot with different people running it…but certainly will get indexed which is the main thing, right? Getting indexed is key….
A human search directory has absolutely NO chance against an automated search index created by the likes of google. Even google's is nowhere near 100% in crawling the entirely web (one would guess). And they launch tens of thousands of web crawlers which actively scour the internet for content every second, every minute of every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. How many humans would even have the time and inclination to submit websites to directories?
Because of the sheer size of the world wide web, I doubt whether any human search directory can be even one-millionth the size of automated crawled search engine indexes.
Seriously, the sheer numbers are unimaginably, mind-bogglingly huge. A human directory is but a drop in the ocean or even less than a drop in the ocean.
I hope nobody seriously thinks that such search engines are anywhere near usable for practical search.
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So speaks Papa Hari.
Seriously though, how many of the search results in Google and the likes have completely irrelevant information showing up in the results? Human-powered doesn't necessarily mean better in terms of the number of results, but the quality can end up being much better. If I search for Papa Hari, I want to find your website, not a website for Viagra.
RT, how can one be so sure "what" somebody is searching for when using keywords?
So human inserted submissions might miss out very relevant information about the website and the chances of that happening is much more than when an automated crawler digs through the site.
Also as you have probably noticed, there can be no such thing as a "context sensitive" search engine because it is nearly impossible to judge what exactly a person is looking for sometimes by just looking at keywords.
It's a complex topic, this.
Let me add to that. Someone searched for "Shaved pussy with hari butt" on Google and got my infamous cats. What would the relevant result be? It certainly wouldn't be any damn cats.
The mind absolutely boggles.
pretty neat! It seems a lot like mahalo with the human powered search result pages.
I tried this site back in February. I'll have to pay another visit. Thanks for the reminder.
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[...] Want to know how to use Feedburner to offer RSS updates by email? RT is the man to see. Check out info on the Top of the Blogs, a new ranking service . Heard about Stumpedia? It is a new human-powered search engine. RT has been there and lived to tell the tale. [...]
TO be very true, Who is going to use it? I think they need a lot of promotion first to be in news and in minds. I have just tried a few terms and have found nothing, it leads me to a page to add those terms with related links. I am not sure if it is going to do something or not but whatever it is, it will take a lot of time.
I agree with Hari – with the explosion of Internet, it is naive to think that a human powered search engine will be able to present better and more current results.
Relevancy + Convenience = Google!
Natural language query vs keyword search is what this is really about. Stumpedia is a semantic search engine that allows humans to match natural language queries to relevant search results.
As of Dec 2008, they have 3,400 members and 30,000 search terms… the idea might be good, but I don't see them successful…
I can understand why some people are annoyed with the results of Google but would generally use different search terms to find what I am looking for, rather than using different search engines like this.
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I agree that Google needs an alternative, but Stumpedia is far away from competing with Google. Yahoo and MSN results are simply pathetic…
Yep, google is the best search engine. But sometimes I find something in Altavista that I can't in google. So, I still use various search engines, if really needed, to get to the right site I want.