Two search engines launched in the last couple of days - mahalo and sproose - have started a new trend. The theory is that algorithmic results aren't good enough any more. There needs to be a human layer as well. In Mahalo's case, that human editing is complete - at least for a small sub-set of the search queries that are made. For Sproose, it is partial, an add on to every algorithmic result.
So this got me wondering, does this mean we've taken technology as far as it can go? Are we really at a place where Page Rank is such a good and complete solution that the only way to actually improve upon it is to provide human supervision - regardless, or should i say in spite of, the standard issues that come with human intervention (spamming, lack of scale, etc.).
Hmmmm.