Stumpedia

On February 22, 2008, Stumpedia launched as another entry into the Human Powered Search Engine category. Stumpedia differs from Mahalo, however. Rather than paying staff to generate targeted search results pages, Stumpedia depends on the good will of the community to submit links and suggest relevant search terms for each.

SearchRank.com has published a nice overview of the Stumpedia service if you want to get acquainted with exactly how it works. In the end, it's very easy to use and intuitive to navigate. After playing with it for a while, here are some observations -

Human Powered Search
It's pretty clear to me that the holy grail of search lies beyond the algorithm. Any attempt at human powered search seems seems at first glance to be untenable. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming and it's daunting to consider the number of people required to perform the task. Mahalo's approach to employ staff around the country (globe?) to build hand-crafted search pages seems unmanageable in the long run, especially when you consider the rate at which new web content is produced. It's also hard to consider their pages 100% objective when they're produced by paid staff.

The potentially better solution is the path Stumpedia has taken - let the searchers themselves indicate which sites are relevant for given search terms. The risk in this model, that Mahalo avoids, is abuse. If Stumpedia starts to get any traction it will become a magnet for online marketers, spammers, and the like. At that point the quality of the search results become suspect unless Stumpedia can somehow keep the hordes at bay. Their stance on this is that they expect the community to be self-policing. How well this will work remains to be seen. They shouldn't lose site of the fact that a non-trivial portion of their user base will be marketers attempting to influence the results pages - and these folks tend to work together more often than rat each other out.

Google Indexed Search Results
I covered this point when looking at whether Mahalo fits Google's definition spam, but it's curious to see the Stumpedia search results pages being indexed by Google. For Stumpedia to be genuine in their attempt to become an alternative search engine, they should block the spiders from indexing their results pages. One search engine garnering traffic from another is simply a terrible user experience. Stumpedia should be able to stand on their own merits and attract a user base through the quality of their results.

Value Proposition
Stumpedia is in a bit of tricky situation at the moment. Since they rely on site visitors to submit links, they're going to depend heavily on content producers to join up and start adding their sites. Publishers will only do this, however, if there is a large enough user base such that they can expect a reasonable amount of return traffic. But currently there simply aren't enough links submitted to the site to make it useful for the searcher and so I expect adoption will be slow. So we have the publishers waiting on the searchers and the searchers waiting on the publishers. Stumpedia will likely need to lower the barrier for link submission (RSS?) to encourage publishers to jump on board. Right now, link submission is manual and I doubt major publishers will be keen to dedicate man-hours to submitting links individually.

There are some quirks I noticed while using Stumpedia, but I expect these will get flushed out as the service matures. I've submitted a few links as a test, to see what kind of traffic it generates. Stumpedia also displays the number of users, submitted links, and search terms directly on their home page. I've started to record those numbers and will check back a few times a week to track their progress.

Related Posts: Stumpedia Stalled?

Comments

[Lisa H]

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