At least I can post under my real name versus choosing an ex-employee’s name to hide under coward.

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

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.

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.

stumpya.com is still available if anyone wants it. I have no use for it.

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.

Harry “thought they hated each other or is that VW’s Boutin” Wang

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.

What’s the not-an-i meant to be doing anyway? It looks like someone trying to strike a really bad boxing pose.