To Search Smarter, Find a Person?

Svonkie writes "Brendan Koerner reports in Wired Magazine that a growing number of ventures are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet's wealth of information. These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. 'The vogue for human curation reflects the growing frustration Net users have with the limits of algorithms. Unhelpful detritus often clutters search results, thanks to online publishers who have learned how to game the system.'"

Comments

New Ingenious Filtering System!

[RobBebop]

His solution was to create Brijit, a Washington, DC-based startup launched in late 2007 that produces 100-word abstracts of both online and offline content. Every day, Brijit publishes around 125 concise summaries of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as audio and video programs, rating each on a scale of 0 ("actively avoid") to 3 ("a must read") so readers can decide whether it's worth their time to click through.

Tag article "activelyavoid" and move along.

Interestingly enough, this whole thing sounds like an idea Rob Malda thought up about 10 years ago, except Brijit lacks a discussion and moderation system where experts and opinionated thinkers can vie to share their collective wisdom to enhance the content of the original article.

It's not that hard to get rid of the crap

[Animats]

We're back to the Yahoo! model because people have figured out how to game the system, namely Google, without adding content that's important to the searcher.

It's not hard to throw out most of the bottom-feeders. We do it. The crowd at Search Engine Watch (which, despite the name, is all about advertising, not search quality) is writing me angry messages for doing that. Now that we've demonstrated that 36% of Google AdSense advertisers are bottom-feeders, they know they're being watched. Some feel they're being targeted.

Bear in mind that most search requests are really, really dumb. That's what Google has to answer. In fact, most Google search requests don't hit the search engine at all; there's a cache of common queries and answers in all the front end machines, and a sizable fraction of requests are answered from cache.