Webupon

With so many search engines out there and Google leading the way, noone would have thought that there would be a place for improvement. But there is. It’s called Stumpedia. One of the reasons Digg.com is so successful is because users decide what people would like to read about. There’s no bots or a backend team to manage things. People decide for people.

Stumpedia is just like that. It combines the ideology behind Digg and te power of a search engine to bring people quality results. It all worls like this: the best results when doing an onnline search are the ones suggested by people looking for the same thing. You are more likely to find stuff you really need, based on other users’s suggestions than to rely on a cold and automatized bot.
For example, you search for linux on Stumpedia. The list of search results appears. If you find that the first few don’t really match what you wanted to get, you can vote them down, comment on the items and even delete it from the search results so it won’t get in your way later.

Since Stumpedia is all about socializing, search results can be shared with other people. Click on the “Share” link below each result and you can send that item to a maximum of four people. Friends might be interested in what you just found, right?

But what if you don’t find your favourite site among the results? Why yes – you can suggest it by enetring it’s link just below the search box. Since Stumpedia is all about Web 2.0, AJAX popups will make your submission faster. Enter the title of the website, a short description and some keywords so others will be able to find it faster.

Not only large websites can be indexed. You have the choice of submitting videos, blogs, news items, images and even social bookmarks. The whole Stumpedia concept has a nice democratic ring to it.

Since the search engine is powered by Google, results come up fast. Furthermore, as a registered user you can start earning money by submitting articles and singing up for Google Adsense. You can choose from a wide range of topics, from animals to politicvs to technology to traveling. Unlike other site I’ve seen, in Stumpedia they let you post a picture of yourself on top of each article, so people will get a more intimate feeling while reading your text. If they like it, they can rate it from one to five stars or even download it for later viewing by saving a DOC file with the text on their harddrive. The best thing is, all revenue earned goes to the author.
The social search engine has already over 3.000 members and is evolving every month into something worth checking out. For example, introduced a few months ago was the “Instant Answers” section. There’s a search field, there’s your question, the submit button and – voila – your instant answer. I asked “what Linux to use?” and Ubuntu and Debian came as answers. And indeed, Ubuntu is the most appraised Linux distribution out there. I tried it a few more times with different questions and each time the answer came instantly and was satisfactory.

I bookmarked Stumpedia and started using it daily. When looking for something on the web, I’d rather trust 20 people that rated a search result with thumbs up than a bot that might just not provide the right answer.