Stumpedia: Yet Another Human-Powered Search Engine
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Google seems to hold a lock on the search space, but many of us still come up empty-handed from time to time when we search. It's enough to keep us looking for a better search engine, or at least one that goes about the whole business differently. Stumpedia offers a big difference: no bots, no spiders, no algorithms, just users entering links and voting them up or down.
Stumpedia CEO Luis Pereira likes to differentiate his human-powered search engine from the others that are out there. “Stumpedia is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. Unlike Mahalo and Wikia Search, Stumpedia is not a content producer or provider and as such does not host any content pages. Furthermore, unlike traditional search engines we do not use bots or crawlers,” he explained in an e-mail to me.
Launched in February 2008, the site features a blog, as you would expect for any good Web 2.0 company. As of the time of this writing (late March 2009), it boasted 45,019 members, 16, 761 links, and more than 40,000 search terms. Just looking at those numbers, my first inclination would still be to take my searches to Google.
On top of that, I'm not so sure that what Stumpedia offers is as unique as Pereira claims. For example, Searchles allows its users to submit links with keywords, and offers a rating system that any member can use to vote particular links up or down. For that matter, Delicious.com offers a place to store links where other users can rate them, and gives you the option of keeping your links private. Delicious has been around since 2003, and according to Wikipeda, it has more than five million users and more than 150 million bookmarked URLs.
So naturally, I have to wonder what I can get with Stumpedia that I can't get anywhere else. Good ideas are still good ideas, but if they've already been executed better, do we need yet another search engine that claims to be different but isn't? Or worse, one that claims to be different and better, but isn't? That's what I aim to find out today.
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