Elanso

Are the results you receive when conducting a search using Google, Yahoo, MSN and a myriad of other search engines leaving a lot to be desired? Are the relevant results buried beneath irrelevant splogs and paid-for results? Stumpedia hopes to change all that.

Human Powered?

If my memory serves me correctly, Yahoo had the first human-powered search engine. It was their humans doing all the work, based on submissions from the public. This was before other companies developed search engine spiders which could crawl and index websites without human intervention. The Yahoo search engine was really nothing more than a searchable directory, much like the Open Directory Project is today.

Stumpedia appears to be somewhere in between, but without a directory and without spidering any websites. Members submit links with keywords and they're added to a searchable index — searchable by the keywords that members submit with the links.

Relevance

When I last checked, Stumpedia had a mere membership number of 1098. This is an insanely low number for this kind of service. I've seen many blogs with more RSS subscribers than that. Stumpedia has been around since January (a mere 4 months, give or take a week). I suspect it isn't heavily marketed and I'm merely guessing that based on the number of members and the infrequent updates on the blog that supports it.

The relevant results from this search engine, and how high or low they are in the results, is wholly dependent on the members. Each search result can be voted up or down. Search engine spamming will be incredibly futile in this kind of environment, but I'm sure some unscrupulous individuals will try it.

Features

You can submit links to your social bookmarks, social profiles, blogs, news stories, authoritative articles, images, videos, and web pages.

You can get instant answers. It's like instant messaging meets Yahoo! Answers. Chat in real-time. You can even answer questions if you install a plug-in for Windows or Mac OS X.

There are a lot of features I haven't explored yet. For instance, I don't know what the meaning is behind the points system.

Recommendations

This isn't a real review. I haven't had the time to go through each feature enough to write a real review. I've submitted two of my blog posts and one blog page, just to see how it works. It won't be until I submit a lot of posts that I'll be able to determine how effective the service is.

In my opinion, this is something you need to take a look at and experiment with. If you avoid the temptation to use irrelevant keywords, I think it may pay off in the long run. A lot of people are becoming dissatisfied with the algorithmic results produced by the big players in the search engine game and this kind of search engine may be where they end up heading.