CrowdFound: fascinating web site, but is it search

Stuart Corner
Monday, 08 October 2007 18:58

Opinion and Analysis

Three Australians have launched crowdfound.com, billing it as the world's first human-powered 'best of the web' discovery engine, and saying that it is designed to overcome the limitations of search engines. But is it really a substitute for search?

CrowdFound predefines certain categories and subcategories of information, and then users decide what content goes into these, and how highly it is ranked, by continuously submitting and voting on submitted content.

For example there are categories for comedy and humour, for sport, business and money, music, news and so on. Cofounder Gareth Saunders describes CrowdFound as "a people-powered content discovery engine combined with social networking and social book-marking applications."

He adds: "We started CrowdFound because we felt there was a better way to find highly relevant quality content on topics of interest rather than by trawling through page after page of search engine results. We found the search engines to be great for presenting content that represented the best search engine optimised (SEO) material for that particular topic. However, to really find a significant quantity of in-depth content on any particular topic required going through page after page of results and sifting through forums, blogs and other sites, and only finding relevant quality content every so often."

His fellow cofounder, Joe Olejnik, also gives the primary reason for developing it as being shortcomings of traditional search and directory sites. "We identified the lack of ability to find high quality content on specific subjects all in one place as one of the biggest problems on the internet. Sure there are search engines and directory listings, but it's not all in one spot and quite often search results provide too many non-relevant and / or outdated results which are poorly organised due to all the clutter that is out there."