Human Powered Search Engines

In this day of age where automation and fast results are favored, to companies are taking a different approach to searches, they use humans. This site, http://www.mahalo.com/ , use people to help create search results.

Basically, whatever search results come up from searching at mahalo.com, all of these results have been screened by people to a certain extent or the answer is provided by a particular person. It works a bit like wikipedia or everyone can contribute and then there are different levels of editors that make sure the search results presented are good quality, etc. Also each contributor is ranked as to how good his/her advice and search results are.

This is taking online searches to a whole new level. Search engines are constantly trying to give better results, as posted in a different thread, decentralized searches are in the workings. Yet the best way to search is to have someone guide you to a particular answer. A google searched can be screened by a person and the best results are given to whoever asks for it. This is slow, tedious, and almost impossible to document and rank every search results found in standard searching engines but human-powered searches give quality results.

Is this worthy to invest in such a human-powered search or should people try to constantly strive to find better algorithms to use for automated searches?

Meh, i dont think it's worth it. i tried searching for something and got nothing but i did like how it gave you results for different search engines and other social networks such as flicker or wikipedia.