Yesterday Bernard Lunn from ReadWriteWeb wrote a post about so called human powered search. He gave some pros and cons of using services such as Mahalo or About.com. I agree that main idea of creating such a services is creditable, this is also one of most important reasons for running this blog - to learn how to eliminate search SPAM.

According to Lunn the biggest hurdle would be breaking the ‘Google habbit’, as he names it. Yeap, I agree, the most beatiful thing in Google’s algorhytm is that it is most democratic one, the more hists your site has the higher in rank you are. Unfortunately in many cases, what shows up in search results is spam, but obviously it’s not spam for many other people.

In this situation we can do two things: invent more effective search methods or find new search engines. Is the human powered search and solution? I don’t think so, at least now. Still too little topics were wokred out and at the same time to-be-processed information multiplies each second toghater with the demand for it. What programmed algorhytm can process in few seconds takes minutes for human being. It is impossible to keep up the information deluge.

There’s something more - costs. Every venture has to make profit. Human’s work is the most expensive at the market. It seems impossible to create general human powered search, but it looks more probable and less insane to create some specialized one using already existing resources, for instance - newspapers archives (maybe the About.com owned by NY Times) or some medical database. A niche can guarantee that the information surplus won’t get on top of us. But on the other hand we already have something like that, I mean Wikia or Squidoo.

The difference between Wikia and Squidoo is that they are communities processing information from their passion, not for profit, but Mahalo employs people to process the search results. The question is: will it turn out to be profitable or will it be transformed into not-general search service? I think it won’t revolutionize the information serach market - people will still be using Google, just because it is like democracy - citing Churchill - nothing better was yet invented.

-mw