There’s are some new search engines online, and they seem to think that humans are better at finding relevant information than computer algorithms.

For the last decade, Google has come from being an obscure mix of letters to a multi-billion dollar company and a new verb in the english language.  Altavista, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and other search engines that were once relatively known have become secondary sources for people who might not find what they’re expecting out of the first few pages in a Google search.  But all of these engines have something in common; software algoritms.

Most of the major search vendors have used complex, comprehensive and exhaustive algoritms on the seemingly endless number of pages online in an effort to index/sort/prioritize sites based on their content (or lack thereof).  Three newcomers think that while the algoritms are nice, a more human touch is needed to help people find the information they seek.

PreFound.com feels that humans know what they’re looking for much better than any computer algoritm could ever hope to achieve.  To that end, the site uses people rather than systems to rank search results according to relevance.  Users group similar links together for sharing within a community.  This method turns humans into the engine’s new bots, which reminds me a little of the Wiki idea, where the community provides for itself.

ChaCha.com is another engine that uses people to help users find information, but they do it on a whole different level.  The company uses “guides” to help users find information in real-time through instant messaging.  To make things even more interesting, ChaCha is trying to bring their search to cell phones.  If these people can offer a multi-platform search capability with fast and reliable real-time assistance, then Google might just need to start hiring people to keep their Google Talk windows open and help Ma-Barker find a new casserole recepie.

The third engine I’ve heard talked about recently is hosted by snap.com.  My first impression of this site was “It looks like a blog”.  They offer a preview of search results on one side, with a list on the other.  It also compares your searches to prior ones, looking for which sites you visted most often and how long you stayed there.  This sounds a bit like Amazon’s data mining practice, though I don’t see any chance of Snap somehow charging you more to view a site just because you showed some interest in it previously….

Looking at these engines, I am curious to know what their futures will be like.  I see definate markets for each of them, especially the community-based PreFound, considering the rather large movement towards the social internet technologies.