Crowd Wisdom vs. Google’s Genius

This is an idea whose time has come. Online search is a very frustrating experience. Google is very good but it is still a suboptimal solution. Ranking sites based on links to other sites is just plain stupid. Splattering hundreds of thousands of results to a query leaves a lot of work to the user. Search needs human intervention. But humans work at, well, human speed. They have their whims and preferences that do not necessarily apply to everybody. Take the dmoz directory – edited by humans. It is a failure in my estimation. It takes forever – if at all - to get a site listed on dmoz. Then the editors decide who gets in and where. No forum for debate or disagreement. That is the foundation for getting someone’s preferences thrust upon everyone else. However, the wiki experiment has been a very good step in the democratization of the internet. It has also placed the collective intelligence of millions of humans to the advantage of everyone. The result: Wikipedia is a huge success – one of the top 15 sites worldwide! I believe a Wikipedia like search engine will do wonders for human intelligence driven search. Watch out Google! http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2006/tc20061227_722820.htm?campaign_id=rss_tech