Steve Mansfield operates his own Internet search engine from a place he calls a "secret hideout" — a small office surrounded by low-rent apartments on the outskirts of this college town known for its horse farms.
Mansfield conceived Prefound.com a few years ago on the premise that humans, from pretty much anywhere, can collectively provide better intelligence than a computer program developed out of the Silicon Valley.
Other startups, too, have had similar visions for "social search." And today, even large competitors like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. are pursuing the concept, hoping it'll help make search results more meaningful and thus expand the companies' market share.
Traditional search results are largely based on objective criteria such as counting the number of links other sites have placed to a given Web page. Social search gives people subjective answers — the best sushi restaurant in Chicago or the best website for information about French impressionism — not necessarily the site visited the most.
"You're essentially breaking up a problem and sending it out to a huge number of people for a query, getting answers back," said Steven Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "It kind of ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Other people are going to make associations and connections to information you probably would not have made."
At Prefound, launched earlier this year, users contribute to the knowledge pool by submitting clusters of sites they believe would appeal to like-minded people. As an incentive, the largest contributors even get a share of Prefound's advertising money.
A visitor looking for information on, say, New Jersey beaches can get the user-recommended sites, grouped by users. One user's cluster gives you restaurants, Internet cafes and other information on the coastal town of Ventnor City, N.J.
Results are better the more people contribute sites.
Jones said it's too early to know whether social search will dramatically change the way people look for information on the Internet, but it's already changing the way traditional search companies do business.
Yahoo, a distant second to Google, has entered the game largely by buying some of these startups, namely Del.icio.us, a system for discovering new sites based on shared bookmarks, and Flickr, a photo-sharing site where users tag items with keywords to help friends and strangers alike discover photographs on any topic.
Google has started to incorporate community answers on travel and health questions into its main search engine. It has also established a program allowing users to contribute their own content, tagged with specific attributes, to turn up in search results.
"To some extent the small companies have invented it, but the big companies have been thinking about it for quite a while, too," said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Steven Marder, co-founder of Eurekster Inc., considered one of the earliest social search sites, said Yahoo's and Google's entry into social search was "validating our philosophy and methodology."
While the change in direction at the Internet search leaders proves the startups were onto something, it also is forcing them to either find a specialized niche soon or get swallowed by the much larger fish.
Marder said Eurekster, where results are weighted based on how many users click to a given site, will never be a destination site like Google or Yahoo, but he is trying to market the service for companies that want to build their own specialized search engines on private Web pages.
Likewise, Prefound is largely trying to cater to academics.
Other startup efforts include the appropriately named StumbleUpon, which three Canadians designed to cater to habitual Web surfers. Type in a topic and click "Stumble" to randomly be diverted to a site popular with other users.
