Bessed, A Different Approach to Human-Powered Search
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You don’t have to claim you’re the next “Google killer” to find an audience online. Adam Jusko, founder and CEO of Bessed.com, is taking a different approach to search that has more in common with Wikipedia, About.com and social search engines than employing algorithms. It’s an unusual niche, and it could fit nicely into the way you use the web.
Bessed.com has been around only since October 2006. If the content on the site seems a little sparse, that’s part of the reason. It comes down to the way Bessed works; it’s entirely human-based, and, as its own FAQ admits, “us humans are slower than bots.”
Bessed is built on top of WordPress blog software. Every search results page on a topic that Bessed returns when you search is technically a blog post. Human editors “seed” each topic with five high quality links, and other users can suggest other links to add. Bessed is deliberately limiting the number of links on a topic to 100 however, with the idea of keeping the quality high and keeping out the spam.
The idea of human editors is somewhat reminiscent of About.com, founded ten years ago with the idea that humans are the best guides to the web. Bessed’s approach seems to be more interactive as far as users sending in feedback. There are ways to suggest URLs (more on that in a bit) and to comment on links posted to the site.
One point worth noting is that Bessed’s editors aren’t actually volunteers. These freelancers are actually paid to “seed” topics, so they need to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about the topic and very good at using search engines. In one of his blog entries, Jusko notes that “where appropriate, we try to offer in our top links these types of sites: an overview site, a link or two of recent news on the topic/keyword, recent blog posts, seminal historical events, videos of interest, photographs. Our thought is that if you are researching a topic, you could use our first 10 or so links and get a pretty complete picture.”
So is Bessed mainly for the researcher, the idly curious, someone trying to find out which cell phone or digital camera to buy, or what? Judging from Bessed’s concept, it makes as much sense to ask who a library is for – and the answer is, “it depends on the contents of the library.” Let’s take a look at Bessed’s contents.
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