Seems like only yesterday I was saying that “social participation (especially in the form of community ranking) has a very important role to play in the maturation of content discovery.”
With that on the record, the recent TechCrunch review, Sproose: Human Powered Search Meets Digg was hard to ignore.
The premise of Sproose is simple, visitors can vote up search results. And for a short time, I was intrigued by how simple the interface was. Then I did a search for a phrase that I hit often enough to know what to expect: rss filter.
Feed Rinse was second position, FeedShake was nowhere to be seen (usually, they’re 1 and 2,) and some off-the-wall result held the first spot. A quick click sent Feed Rinse back to the top, but I wonder if a service like this could even be useful prior to gaining thousands of votes on a query. Today, it’s wisdom of 1 vs wisdom of crowds.
I could have led with how easy it would be to game the results, but I think it’s more interesting to consider the fact that all votes are weighted the same. There is no differentiation based on personal authority. In other words, a vote from Marshall K (someone who knows more than a little about rss discovery) would operate the same as a vote from the developer of the off-the-wall result.
I’ve seen hints that Google is working towards authoritative recommendations / suggestions / comments. Credited doctors, for instance, could bless relevant content within their field. I think that’s the right path. The wisdom of [anonymous] crowds will have a hard time divining relevant content. But the wisdom of experts [as a human edit layer] could do a lot.
Alt search engines should be working on developing authority sorting (quality of votes) before implementing crowd sorting (quantity of votes.)
That’s just one person’s opinion though. I only get one vote.
