Human-powered Search Engines to overcome Google in a few years time – or are they?

September 4, 2007
by Latitude

I could easily have called this blog post “Google - Splendours and Miseries of a Giant”. Every business acquisition made by Google over the last two years or so has fuelled the row about the potential threat to trade fairness, information openness, and users’ privacy that such a corporate hegemony represents. Now some observers are announcing the search engine’s fall, arguing that such a powerful controller of the online landscape can’t possibly continue to serve users’ interest. Technology expert Robert Scoble even confidently predicts the overcome of Google by human-powered search engines in four-years time, in a video blog that has sparked off strong reactions in the search engine marketing community (see comments to Scoble’s post, and SEOmoz Rand Fishkin’s reaction in particular).

According to Scoble, “social graph-based search”, such as provided by Mahalo, ensure more reliable and more relevant spam-free search results, since search results pages are compiled by independent and dedicated specialists, with the help of users’ links submissions. A few considerations jump to mind however, moderating Scoble’s enthusiasm:

1. Mahalo only focuses, for now, on the most searched-for keywords. However, in order to overtake Google, they will have at some point to be able to generate results for all possible keywords, a task being made harder by the constant emergence of never-made-before queries from users. I’d like to be proven wrong, but there’s only so much a workforce can do manually, even one reaching several thousands employees.

2. At the beginning of the chain of endorsement that leads to a link being recommended from blogger to blogger, before finally getting listed on Mahalo, must be in most cases a search via traditional algorithm-based search engines. Valuable resources don’t always get their initial boost from spontaneous, untriggered word-of-mouth. Surely exposure has to start somewhere. Human-powered search engines seem then to be more complementary tools than substitute products.

3. Finally, the supposed independence and neutrality of the “guides” powering the “social graph-based” search engines leave me somehow unconvinced. Without denying that Google’s ethical assessment of content can be debatable, and that some SEO spin can help irrelevant content to the top of SERPs, I also find hard to believe that the “guides’” personal opinions won’t affect the choice and classification of the webpages they pick up. Furthermore, with a business model that will generally be based on advertising or sponsorship (see Mahalo‘s statement), how can this new generation of search engines guarantee that the human-picked content will be free of the advertisers’ influence?

Well, as Mahalo’s founder Jason Calacanis has put it himself, it seems that human-powered search engines have still got “a loooooong way to go”.