Peoplequery

An interesting idea that came to me today in a conversation: what about a search engine that queries people instead of the web? There are certain kinds of queries that you could answer better with people's opinions than with simple data. Some examples are matters of opinion, like "what is the best Frank Sinatra album?", or require a certain level of empathy or human-level understanding to answer, like "I'm feeling down, what should I do?"

When you visit the site, you'd get a people query box, as well as a live feed of current queries. Any query you have an opinion about you can click on to answer, with the caveat that questions expire after some very brief time, on the order of 15 seconds. So any answer you have needs to be brief - it's not a detailed Q&A site like Stack Overflow. When you answer a question, you can see (and rate) other people's answers which changes the order that they appear.

The experience would then be something fairly similar to a traditional search engine: enter the query, hit the button, results appear. The only difference is that instead of your query hitting a big database, it hits the collective opinions of all the other people using the site.