ReadWriteWeb

With advance apologies to the hard-working PR folks and startup companies who have pitched us their social search engines this week, there is a rising menace in new media: A cluster of sites that call themselves user-powered search engines.

Much in the vein of the failed Wikia Search (the abandoned brain child of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales), these engines purport to "crowdsource" intelligence about URLs and search terms by allowing users to create profiles and submit, submit, submit content. Stumpedia and Gurutoy are two products in this category. Each offers the excitement of multimedia, semantic, "neue search" capabilities; and each delivers astonishingly dysfunctional results.

Operating as a collective, an ant colony can achieve remarkable things, complete tasks, and solve problems that would be unimaginable for a single ant. Colonies are responsible for building elaborate nests, waging battles, and creating efficient highway systems to food sources. The collective intelligence of an ant colony can serve as inspiration to help us solve complex human problems. Businesses in particular are finding innovative ways to apply these lessons from nature, from routing trucks to managing plane congestion on the tarmac... to making Internet search more accurate.