Stumpedia: The Social Powered Search Engine
Stumpedia is a human powered search engine that relies on participation from its members to index, organize and review the information found in the internet. Users can participate by sharing their knowledge and interests with one another and provide an alternative to search engines that are powered by bots and algorithms.
Page ranking is totally human generated and will depend on votes/rating made by the members. Think Google search results combined with Digg rating. Whenever a search is made the results with the most votes will appear first. In the image that I have provided (below), I searched using the keyword “google” and it displayed Sphinn on top of the Google homepage. This is the result of more people voting for Sphinn rather than Google and you will see thumbs down votes for Google itself. This is how human interaction can totally affect the search results for Stumpedia. It is totally up to the members to properly vote in order for the search engine to work properly.
I emailed the Stumpedia team and asked a question regarding the prevention of spam in their service and got a quick reply from Luis Pereira, Founder & CEO of Stumpedia.
How do you protect Stumpedia from being infiltrated by spammers and spam sites?
Presently we’re leaving it up to the community to handle spam submissions by voting down irrelevant results. We’re also monitoring activity and are prepared to take action if spam becomes a problem. Banning people that spam, removing spammy results, etc, are all options we are open to.
Another feature of Stumpedia is the instant answer feature where anybody can ask a question and get an instant answer from real people (members of Stumpedia). You can also participate in answering questions by downloading their widget. This feature is slightly similar to the Mosio service which provides answers from its users through the use of text messages, email and IM’s. The only difference is that most of the questions asked in Stumpedia are link or website related.
Founder and CEO Luis Pereira also mentioned some of the features that they are adding to the Stumpedia service.
Some future stuff in the works include:
a.. Users will have the ability to import and share their social bookmarks, making them easily searchable using the Stumpedia search feature. Imported bookmarks would be ranked using their Social Rank algorithm and their associated tags would become search engine friendly. For example, tags such as “search engines,” “search_engines,” “search-engines,” and “searchengines” would be considered one in the same and produce the same search results.
b.. Social bookmarking features similar to del.icio.us will be added.
c.. Additional social networking features such as adding/inviting friends and sharing link submissions are in the works.
d.. A feature that ranks and scores activity of members.
e.. Future submission sections for news, videos, and images will be added.
Human Interaction is always important for social networking services. In a service like Stumpedia, a certain degree of responsibility among the members is the key essential in order for the service to be a success. People will want and expect accurate search results from the search engine (which is what everybody expects from any search engine). It will be up to the community to to manage the results through responsible linking and voting. Stumpedia is an interesting service and if you want to help it grow by registering your blogs and favorite websites, head over to the site right now and start Stumpin.
Tags: answers, Google, human generated, mosio, pagerank, questions, search-engine, social bookmarking, stumpedia, web search engine, website
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