There’s a new kind of search engine that is looking to take on the might of Google. It’s called Human-powered Search Engine and it looks to use human’s to do what the complex search algorithms can not - weed out the trash and present just the most relevant search results.
The three most prominent ones so far are
chacha: They call it search + brainpower. It looks to be just returning google resuts except the difference is that you can search with a guide. It’s like calling the operator for the nearest restaurant. Sounds like a neat concept but I don’t buy it
sproose: This is a bit of a search engine + digg mash up. Users are supposed to vote for results and so links with more votes appear first. Why people will ever vote for a link I’ll never know. If it gets popular though, I can see this easily being gamed by webmasters. 
mahalo: Mahalo’s goal is to hand-write the top 20,000 search terms. What this means is that they have real people writing up pages and pages of basically portal pages for each search term! If there’s no search page written yet, it will return a bunch of google results. I think this is really neat. If I was to turn jyse.com into a human powered search engine, this would be pretty close to how I’d do it. Either you get a hand editted links to the most authoritative sites, or you get the next best thing - Google.
Popularity: 8%
