Next in Search Engines: Human-powered?

In an article today posted at CNet, they discuss the new search engine Wikia. This just launched search engine is completely open. It is the public who will determine what information is found and they also have many other ways to contribute to the search.

This search engine combines three of the main new tools on the Internet: human ranking of pages, a mini wiki and social networking.

To launch the site, spiders will crawl the web to bring up initial pages. But after that, the humans that take over. People will individually rank the sites they come across. After the pages are ranked by humans, the highest rated page will appear at the top on the search page. At the top of the page there will be a wiki about the search subject. The public will maintain this. As for the social networking, you can network with those who have left comments and edited the wiki. In addition to all of this, this site is a complete open source. Users can also tweak the code of the website.

Most interesting is that since the pages are rated by people, SEO will not be a factor in this search engine. I believe that the ability for people to rank the pages is far more valuable than anything we’ve seen before. If we set this in the environment of a corporation, the power of the knowledge that can be generated is huge. It is a chance for collaboration to shine; the most informational web pages can rise to the top. This concept might not take off at first, but I see an advantage to having human generated web pages. Would you use a search engine like this?