Fresh off Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' announcement of his impending
community-powered search engine Wikia, EarthFrisk.org has drawn first
blood, announcing their community search engine, ready for use.

EarthFrisk promises better results and less spam by eliminating the
traditional algorithm- and link-based search and will rely on
community involvement in the way of votes and comments to produce
search results. It all hinges on their color value (CV) system. When a
search result is returned, users have the option to log in, then vote
and comment on the result. EarthFrisk says that this method keeps
results from being manipulated by bogus links and that their CV
ratings "cannot be manually altered by any one company." By
downloading the EarthFrisk toolbar, users can get a quick view of a
site's "value" by looking at the CV bar for a color-coded rating. In a
quick test of the new service, presumably because of limited use, all
of the results have returned a "green" rating.

EarthFrisk returns results from many major outlets from a variety of
categories - Search Engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, Clusty), Social
Media (Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Reddit), and
Information (Wikipedia, Brittanica, Dictionary, Infoplease WebMD).

A couple of nice features at first glance:

* A preview pane pops up when moused over (why has Google not
included this simple feature?). But so far, many of the previews are
blank and read "forbidden request."
* Search only certain resources, such as Google, Digg or Wikipedia.

In the end, just like everything community-powered, the real value
will only be seen when users actually participate. And with every
social media outlet imaginable, taking even more time away from people
could be a tall order.