Human powered search engine

through San Fransisco Chronicle:
A P2P like question-answer service shall offer competition to google's service.

Scott Jones knows it's probably not wise to try to out-Google Google. But he's also not ready to concede that the world's leading search engine, or any of its main competitors, has the Web search trick down completely.

The Indiana tech inventor, who helped pioneer voice mail, is working on a new search engine model that employs thousands of paid "guides," who will provide live one-on-one help to users who need extra assistance tracking down online information. The free service, called ChaCha.com, goes live today as a test and is expected to go into full beta later this year. more

If presumably non-biased specialised can out-google google will be proven in the upcoming months. Yet in the form of wikis, this is already happening, but in a snail-mail kind of way.

If people would be patient enough to post subjects of interest on wikipedia and wait for someone to write about it, you would have a patient chaha.com as the service is called. But we don't live in patient times or do we? Considering google's fast response yet taking into account the time it takes before you REALLY find what you been looking for, I often would be happy to have someone alive around to just tell him/her what I want and get information back based on a human description. As long as google doesn't integrate searches like "you 'no I was like looking for that flic with that fella from that action movie in the arctica and the bird from baywatch", chacha might be the next thing in search engine technology.

What it just as well brings up is the question of how much human bias and intelligence is in google's bot codes and filter systems.