Why is Jatalla so different from other search engines?

Conventional search engines rely upon computers to rank the relevance of web pages to search terms. Several different ranking methodologies are used: counting the number of links to a given web page or counting the number of occurrences of a particular term in a page, for example.

By contrast, Jatalla relies only upon relevance rankings performed personally by actual human beings. You and people like you are literally the ranking mechanism used by Jatalla.  When you perform a search on Jatalla.com, you are interviewing the entire world of Web users, and only those opinions matching your query — character-for-character — are counted in generating search results.

But unlike other software sites where the content is created and regulated by administrators, Beta Marker is governed as a pure democracy. The people, software enthusiasts around the world - you, rule this domain.

Free press.Beta marker members can submit any software they like to the site. The software may be in alpha, beta or final development stages. It may have a large software company behind it or a one-geek team.

Majority Rule.All software is voted on by other Beta Marker members. If the software rocks, it will be voted for by many members and be promoted to the home page where it will be shared with all Beta Marker members. If it sucks, members will vote against it and it will be removed.

Pligg's Web 2.0 user interface gives your visitors a reason to come back to your site by making them decide on the site's content and giving them the chance to social network. By giving users the ability to collaboratively submit and dismiss articles, you are offering an experience that users are happy to take part in on a daily basis.

Smartpox.com is an interesting crossover between the online and offline worlds. The technology allows users to encode URL links, phone numbers, email, and text into 2D barcodes. These codes can then be read using a cameraphone running the J2ME Smartpox reader. So a Smartpox is essentially a 2-dimensional barcode, which contains data that can be decoded using the Smartpox reader in a mobile phone.

The goal of Smartpox is to be a "viral messaging" application, allowing people to link their online world with the offline world....