I was reading up about Amazon’s e-book reader Kindle (how could I not, with it being both a new toy and book related!) and ran on an interesting bit on a review:
Kindle gives you access to an experimental and free service called Kindle NowNow, which is a search engine powered by actual humans. You send any question, and a human being will research it for you, then send the best three answers, usually, Amazon says, within five minutes.
Couldn’t help but think of A Deepness in the Sky and the Focused humans working behind the scenes to add human interpretations to things as mundane as searching for a topic.
Here’s the MacWorld article.