I can definitely see human-augmented search engines working in niches. i.e. crawl and index a category of content (like all the museum sites in the world), categorize the info (hours of operation, prices, directions, exhibits, etc), have people eyeball it against the real sites for accuracy. It's like the Semantic Web without expecting the web to change.
But as a general purpose search tool? No, there are too many things people search for. Google is right too often for anyone to remember something else as a backup search.
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I can definitely see human-augmented search engines working in niches. i.e. crawl and index a category of content (like all the museum sites in the world), categorize the info (hours of operation, prices, directions, exhibits, etc), have people eyeball it against the real sites for accuracy. It's like the Semantic Web without expecting the web to change.
But as a general purpose search tool? No, there are too many things people search for. Google is right too often for anyone to remember something else as a backup search.
Steam engine beats John Henry. Every time. So short answer: no. Human powered search will not last.
Cro-Magnon replaced Neanderthal. Robots will replace us. Nothing personal. It's just evolution.
:-)