Look out for Stumpedia

Thanks to Sergey at TechWeb Media I am looking at and testing the first human powered social search engine. And I really like what I have seen so far from Stumpedia.

It’s a search engine, but instead of the spider from Google, Yahoo or any of the other major search engines, this is powered by people, like you and me. We can all submit sites and recommend sites for specific keywords and phrases, and like web 2.0 sites (digg, reddit, propeller), we can rank the websites at Stumpedia.

I guess this means that instead of like Google uses their pagerank and all sorts of algorithms to give you the spot in their serp (search engine rank page), Stumpedia trust people to rank the sites.

But is that all there is to it?

I am not sure.

You have to sign up in order to submit links to Stumpedia, and you need to sign up in order to vote on websites. Only members will get access, non-members can use it as a search engine, that’s all.

I have been testing Stumpedia for searching, and for some keywords there are not much information. For instance, I searched for Facebook and I received one website, I searched for protein and it didn’t come up with anything.

At this very moment, Stumpedia has 3,127 links, 593 members and over 3,500 search terms.

Even though Stumpedia is not that big yet, it has the potential of becoming a major player among the search engines – the only question remains, do you trust your friends to vote for the most relevant websites?

We need to trust the community at Stumpedia to come up with the top websites, and that it won’t become just another web 2.0 site packed with spammers and golddiggers out to get their own websites to the top.

Personally, I think that the biggest problem for Stumpedia is how to sget the relevant and important websites with great content to the top, instead of entertaining websites with cool and funny content.

I can give you an example.

If you do a search for George Bush, you will get three results. The one at the top is a funny YouTube video, and the next two are facts about George Bush sr and jr at wikipedia. If you compare this to the identical search in Google, the top two are the pages from wikipedia, and the YouTube video is at number 8.

What happens when people starts to submit more funny videos of George Bush? There are a lot of funny videos about this guy, and suddenly, the facts and the important information regarding the President of the United States of America is nowhere to be found.

I am just guessing here, and I hope I am not right.

I will continue to use Stumpedia to see how well it develops, you never know what will happen, but one thing’s for sure – Look out for Stumpedia.