There is a new search engine being developed, Reference Extract. It’s a search engine that gives preference to results tagged by librarians. So where Google and others are trying to remove the human part of the search equation, the folks at Reference Extract are trying to harness the expertise of all the card carrying MLS people out there.

This trained “professional filter” is exactly why I will always watch the network news and read newspapers. There is just too much bunk out there that I want to know that some sort of professional has done the leg work and sorted it for me. But I’m not sure how successful Reference Extract will be…

there just seems to be too much info out there to really make “human sorting” a real game-changer.

It just seems that too often the returns would have to rely on a Google or some other algorithm, since no one has had a chance to tag it. They only launched their site on October 1st, so we’ll just have to keep watch and see how they do. It’s really a pretty good try at the “original” search engine model.