Just A Thought… Human Edited Search Engines

I am a bit curious about the whole “wiki” phenomenon. There are human edited encyclopedias, human edited directories, but there are not many human edited search engines. Why is that?

A human edited search engine is a search engine that has people accept or reject a web site from getting into the index, and they use people to check up on sites that may be suspected of using spam techniques. Unlike search engines like Google or MSN, in human edited search engines a person will look at your site and decide whether it is spammy or not before it gets into the index.

Even better, why can’t the big SEs add in a simple “Report Spam” link next to the results? Surely these big multi billion dollar companies can hire a few people to check sites if they are spammy. Heck, why couldn’t search engines follow a *gulp* Digg-like approach and only report a URL as spam if it gets a certain number of votes as being spam. This way it would take a lot of people to report it, instead of one or two. They could even add in a feature that will disable the “report spam” link for well-established sites like Apple, Microsoft, Digg, Netscape, etc. Not only would it greatly lower the amount of spam in the results, but it would also prevent abuse of the system.

Perhaps I am missing something, but it seems like that type of system would solve the ever growing problem of spam sites gaining top positions. It would make it much easier for everyone. The SE programmers would not need to lose sleep trying to make new algorithms, and SEOs would have a much easier job.

Why chase the spammers around when you can put in a system to stop it once and for all?

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