Using people - not software - to find Dulcinea...or anything else

A New York-based Search firm relies on human judgment, rather than software, to sift through tons of information on the Web and provide relevant results.
8/20/2008 5:00:00 AM By: Nestor E. Arellano

In a Web Search industry where algorithms spit out results in split seconds, automation is king, and seems to have completely edged out the human factor.

But the folk at findingDulcinea.com will tell you differently.

This New York-based firm relies on human judgment, rather than software, to sift through tons of information on the Web and provide very focused Search results.

While to some this technique may seem hugely archaic, the people at findingDulcinea.com say the results are phenomenal.

And they attribute this to a very targeted approach.

"Google provides you with five billion sites; we only choose the 20,000 that matter," said Mark Moran, CEO and founder of findingDulcinea.com.

Moran says he became fascinated with Internet Search during his earlier career as a lawyer.

Partners in the firm often turned to him for research assistance because they found it hard to wade through the avalanche of information that confronted them each time they typed out queries.

Moran said he got so good at Search that he, family members and some friends decided to set up their own Internet Search company.

As the story goes, Moran's father loves Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, and had always asked, to no avail, that his children name a daughter after Dulcinea – the love interest of the novel's hero.

Naming his first company Dulcinea was as far as Moran would go.

The nine-month-old firm depends on a full-time staff of about 30 writers and editors, plus 25 freelance contributors and subject matter experts to seek out "refutable" Web sites on a wide variety of topics.

A query on the Beijing Olympics in a mainstream search engine is likely to generate very diverse results. These could range from medal statistics, to the event's official Web site, sites of media outfits covering the game, and perhaps articles and blog posts on the topic –plus a host of video's images and maps.

Google will probably come up with upwards of 100 pages on the topic – with each page featuring around 10 entries.

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