Stumpedia, a “human powered search engine” we’ve not covered before has added live search results ChaCha style.
This is how they spin it:
Stumpedia.com, the social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web is launching another human-powered search feature similar to the guided search model that was recently ditched by ChaCha.com. Our approach to the guided search model is dependent on crowdsourcing and the benefits of social media participation.
They don’t provide any details on their site, but given the “DOWNLOAD PLUG-IN SO YOU CAN ALSO ANSWER QUESTIONS” link on the page and the mention of crowd sourcing I think this translates to users also provide the live answers.
The wisdom of offering a service like this, unless simply a publicity stunt, is flawed: as we know 90% of the users on ChaCha were pranksters and as ChaCha eventually found out, the model doesn’t work. Stumpedia adds another dimension though to the process: now you can not only torment the person giving the answer, you can suprise those asking the questions as well, offering a whole new world of joke blog posts and corresponding screenshots.
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I like the feature of “Most Recent Activities” but the search results are not extensive.
I also offer live human assisted searches on my search engine at http://www.findinfo.com but it never seems to get any publicity like chacha.com did. The live chat help on my site comes from search engine experts in an office in India, so they give much better answers than the 30,000+ unsupervised “experts” who worked from home that chacha was using. Yes, many of the people using FindInfo.com are pranksters, but many are people who actually need help finding information.
A guy standing with his legs apart and arms in the air does not look anything like an ‘i’. Stumped-a have apparently gone for the Fawlty Towers school of logo design.
What’s the not-an-i meant to be doing anyway? It looks like someone trying to strike a really bad boxing pose.
ChaCha just won AT&T’s FastPitch mobile developers competition at CTIA and is going to be on the deck of AT&T wireless phones, reaching its 70 million subscribers. The news release from AT&T is in the AT&T online press room: http://www.att.com/gen/press-r.....leid=25431
I also offer paid research services in my site http://www.AnsMart.com It serves difficult questions though
I dont know about Stumpedia, but ChaCha is a great service. Check it out again. On the mobile side!
@Brandon Of course you would say it’s great since you are an employee.
Why does this company feel the need to have their employees spread the word? If the service was truly great, wouldn’t the word get out on it’s own?
It’s interesting to note how the brief mention brings the employees out of the woodwork. I half expect Bryan to post next singing it’s praises.
Is Duncan channeling Ted now?
Harry “thought they hated each other or is that VW’s Boutin” Wang
This could be a great alternative search when you are researching people and searches for things that might not be getting indexed by the big boys (Yahoo /Google).
Another such effort: isayhello.com.
You can plot search engines on a continuum:
> fully-automatic (Google)
> Hybrid (Mahalo / Ask.com)
> fully human (Answers.com, Stumpedia, FindInfo, etc.)
I think Calacanis (head of Mahalo) uses “curated” instead of “hybrid”, which certainly has a nicer ring to it, but I don’t know if that’s an accepted term. (Is anyone hearing that term in general use?)
My gut says that crowd-sourced searching will only work if both the “crowd” and the “search space” is confined to some kind of vertical.
Finding the right balance is very tricky. I know because I’ve spent a lot of time working on that balance with Fonolo. We use a hybrid approach to creating a map of the phone menus (aka IVR systems) for major companies. We use that map to power our “Deep Dialing” service which lets you connect directly to the spot you need, rather than navigating the phone menu.
Stupid logo. I thought it read “stumpedya” with a guy reaching out his arms to become a ”Y”.
stumpya.com is still available if anyone wants it. I have no use for it.
I meant “stumpedya.com” is still available.
I heard they are rebranding to stupidia.com
More logo ripping:
On what strange planet does stumped-a reside? Obviously one with two suns. I can think of no other reason the boxing guy has two shadows.
The problem with entirely human powered results is the amount of time it takes to build a library of results. At http://www.ISayHello.com we are focusing on finding the best places for categories of results, and then working to categorize every search term so that you get good results. We are also creating content for top results. This allows us to be relevant for everything, and great on the most popular results.
Granted with only 48 hours of being live we don’t have a huge assortment of customized results, but we are able to move much faster than most, because we aren’t focusing on re-writing 300 words from wikipedia for every result, we are instead focusing on finding the best results on the web for large categories of data, and so tomorrow when we add 24k results for prescription medications those 24k results will be much better than they were today. And unlike Mahalo or Stumpedia the improvements to those 24k results didn’t cost us even a dollar an entry.
@14: To turn the logo ripping cannibalistic, the grey shadow is a shadow while the yellow shadow is clearly a reflection
The majority of ChaCha guides are native English speakers who usually get what you’re trying to say, understand nuances, humor, and usually can interpret misspellings.
These are things that are difficult for call center employees in a non-English speaking country to mimic.
And this type of interaction is difficult for non-human computer search engine to relate to as well.
Thank you,
Tim
@Ajay,
At least I can post under my real name versus choosing an ex-employee’s name to hide under coward.
Chacha rules! I love it!