PreFound - Giving the Digg and Wikipedia crowd another site to rule

PreFound is a search engine that does not use algorithms and other “fancy” technical tools to find content on the Web. Instead it uses people to find stuff. Novel idea…but I think the amount of people needed to “index” the Web will be very hard to get for such an endeavor.

What worries me about search engines such as this, is that they very similar to Digg or Wikipedia. A small group of pedantic users ban together, and make it really hard for someone else to enter their sites into the index. I think the same thing will happen here. We all know there are biases in algorithms based on the developers and the search engines, but the scale of content that is indexed keeps it from being to obvious, and gives most everyone an opportunity to show up in the results. Another fear is that marketers will get involved and start promoting their own sites, and really bias the results. They may even pay people to “index” content. I know we have never seen that before.

The most annoying part of the site, is the bouncing demo of the bald guy. Every time I went to the homepage, there he was bouncing up and down. Geez, come on… its not 1997.