Stumpedia - Search engines for the darknet - (Onion Links 2024)

If you haven’t heard of human powered search engine, Stumpedia, you might want to give it a whirl. It is essentially a human-powered search engine with a social aspect to it. In other words, Stumpedia allows content producers to submit and profit from their work and then allows the search community to determine relevancy of search results. While it is similar to human powered search engines Mahalo and Wikia Search, it differentiates itself because it is powered by the very people that use it.

How Is Stumpedia Different?

Stumpedia takes a different approach to human-powered search than competing sites Mahalo and Wikia Search. For example, the relevancy of search results at Mahalo is determined by their staff whose underlying motive is to profit from their own internally produced and hosted content. Wikia Search takes the wikipedia approach to creating and hosting collaborative content pages.

Where Stumpedia is unique is the fact that it enables registered users to submit sites along with matching keywords and phrases. The relevancy of search results are then ranked and rated by the volunteer community through the ability to vote listings up or down (much like Digg, Mixx and Sphinn). Unlike Mahalo and Wikia Search, Stumpedia is not a content producer or provider and as such does not host any content pages. Furthermore, unlike traditional search engines they do not use bots or crawlers.

How Does It Work?

Anyone can actually jump right on the Stumpedia Home Page and start searching. The real value is being able to add to the search results in case you do not find what you are looking for but are aware of sites that should be included in those results. To be able to add sites, you follow a simple registration process that asks you to provide an email address and your desired user name. Once you verify your email address by clicking on a link in an email they send to you, you are able to contribute to the search engine.

One word of caution – be careful what you add because you will have a unique address that shows what you have added. Therefore if you choose to add spammy sites or other inappropriate sites, it will be viewable via your public profile. While the public profiles keep track of what you have added, they do not record what you have searched for. So, there is some privacy built in to the experience with regards to what you are actually searching for.

Adding sites is so easy a caveman can do it. For example, I searched for “Arizona web design” which produced zero results (most likely due to the fact that this is still a relatively new service). It’s a good thing I know of a Arizona based web design company (our own) and so I added it. I type in the URL in the submit field and an AJAX function opens a box that reveals a title and description field. If a title tag and meta description tag are present on the site, it populates those fields with that data. However, keep in mind that you can edit those fields as well. After I am satisfied with the data, I hit “Submit Link” and the listing is added as a search result. Sound simple? It is! See screen shots below on how this works.

Initial search for “Arizona web design” produces zero results: