Search Powered by Humans, Hamsters or an Infinite Number of Monkeys

I recently heard about a new search engine, www.Mahalo.com, which bills itself as the world’s first human-powered search engine. This made me think of 3 different things.

The first is to wonder how this is different from the original Yahoo. This was back when the site was created by editors who approved all submissions and assembled catagory-based searches. As the internet was growing by leaps and bounds, they felt it was their mission to provide results to users. It had not yet been determined that spider searches and search algorythms were the answer to internet search. There certainly have been many other category-based searches over the years, so I am not sure what the distinction is here.

The other thing it made me think of is what would the world’s first hamster-powered search engine look like. Would the hamsters power the servers, or would they actually process the search results? There seems to be a parody site here, but I don’t have the time to build it.

And finally, I also wondered about updating that old saying that an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters would create the works of Shakespeare. So, would an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards return accurate search results?