I have started this blog to keep track of all the interesting stuff I read about. In some cases, friends of mine have shared their cool stuff with me. I try to keep the headlines and descriptions short, so you must follow the links to read and decide for yourself if a topic is worth your time. Want to contribute? Just comment on any of the stories and I will be notified instantly.
Obviously computers by themselves are not smart enough to answer all our search request, so now some folks are using real humans to power searching. Some searching is done in real-time by humans over the phone, for example Scott Jones's ChaCha.com. Other searching will apparently be an amalgamation of user recommendations of the best search results, for example Jimmy Wales' Search Wikia.
On Wikipedia I searched for "human search engine" and also found Jatalla.com
These new services depend on a network of people doing all the work. If I were building a network of people I would definitely get pointers from these two big players.
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If you read the article about ChaCha, these are key points:
By January, Jones had signed up 30,000 guides, who log on from their homes and answer user queries in real time via an instant-messaging client. They're paid up to $10 an hour, depending on how users rank the quality of their efforts.
Don't like your guide? Give her a poor review and switch to another with a single click. "I want the bad ones stripped of their ranking," Jones says. Culling notwithstanding, he expects to have 300,000 guides by June - as well as 1 million consistent users.
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