What do I mean?
Well it occurred to me just now that Yahoo already has its own version of human powered search. Yahoo owns Del.icio.us. I have been using Del.icio.us as my very own ’people powered’ search engine for months now without ever thinking about how similar it is to Mahalo. Del.icio.us is a social book marking site that allows tagging. Essentially as people surf the web they find websites and resources they like and then ’tag’ them with various intuitive keywords.
Because the people using Del.icio.us tend to be the higher IQ portion of society (you gotta be a geek to be using it; seriously!) it really is an exceptional content filter. By doing my keyword searches in Del.icio.us, I tend to get much more targeted and relevant search results. What’s more is that as more people save a bookmark, I deem those resources to be better. Thus a quick search for ’valuation’ and ’vc’ will result in much better results than if I did the same keyword search in Google (plus no ads). One feature I wish is that you could do keyword searches within your network, rather than only on the entire universe of users. That way, for example, if I knew five people in my network had niche expertise on say co-location hosting, I would do my searches for ’co-location hosting’ just among these experts.
If Yahoo was smart, they would figure out a way to integrate their more ’collectively intelligent’ search engine, Del.icio.us, into their main search site.
Oh, and Yahoo – if you choose to borrow my suggestion, I want credit for it. Thanks.
