New Search Engine Powered by Human Computers

A company based in California has developed a new search engine that works via distributed computing technology. But the computers are human!

Jatalla.com uses the brain-power of humans to provide search results. How? In the same way that a Wiki uses a social bookmarking service, (also known as a folksonomic tagging system), Jatalla.com offers user-created and user-maintained content. Any registered user can submit a vote called a "lexivote", which consists of a word or phrase and a list of up to three URLs. This lexivote is counted along with all other lexivotes that include the exact same term. Thereafter, when a user queries the search engine using that term, a list of URLs - ranked according to these lexivotes - is returned. Each user is limited to only one lexivote per search term.

The service was developed by Inventerprise LLC, a product development company based in Los Angeles, California, and Viking Web Development, based in Fargo, North Dakota.

"We provide the vessel; users themselves provide the search results."

states the press release on the Jatalla web site.

"Jatalla relies only upon relevance rankings performed personally by actual human beings. You and people like you are literally the ranking mechanism used by Jatalla. When you perform a search on Jatalla.com, you are interviewing the entire world of Web users, and only those opinions matching your query -- character-for-character -- are counted in generating search results."

Unfortunately, judging by the site FAQs, it seems that relevance can be entirely biased by the person submitting the Lexivote:

"Q. Is it okay to be completely self-centered when casting Lexivotes?

A. Yes. Whatever web site you think is the best one -- including your own web site -- with respect to a particular search term is the one you should vote for."

So it remains to be seen how useful the data will be. Jatalla.com is expected to launch in BETA release in July.