A patent application filed in Dec 2007 by Microsoft reveals an interesting spin on the much touted idea of the human search engine that in theory just might succeed where others have failed by building a real economy around hand-crafted search results. When thinking of community-powered search engines or “open source” search engines as this patent affectionately mentions, the first thing that probably comes to mind is Mahalo, especially with the new focus on monetary incentives since its relaunch earlier this month. “to motivate users to create high-quality result lists, the patent describes a system of offering monetary incentives for creators who generate “popular” lists, based on volume and/or rankings by other users, tracking clicks and other measurements on the results set.”

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