What the hell is Qassia?

This morning while making my rounds, I came across a link on the Turnip of Power blog.  (Go ahead, say that without giggling… try it.)  about a service in early Beta called Qassia.  I browsed over and signed up for an account so I could poke around.

Qassia is a search engine like beast in the making.  Search results will contain both normal websearch results like you would get from Google, as well as "Intel" submitted by users.   "Intel" in this context is any bit of knowledge a user wants to share.  I just submitted one about Philadelphia’s Restaurant Week and one about the Google Browser Sync plugin.  One guy has submitted one on how to save money on contact lens maintenance materials.

The intel items can be as lengthy as a Wikipedia article or as short as a single paragraph.  Unlike Wikipedia, your intel items are your own.  Nobody can edit them.  However, before they are visible, at least seven members must screen it.  Any user can screen any available intel by assigning it a grade between A and F.  I think this will be of great use to bloggers who have chosen to work in a tight niche.  If your blog is all about books, but you want to share some info you have about movies, you could go drop that intel at Qassia.

Bloggers can also get some good solid backlinks to their content through the submission of good quality intel.  Any of your intel that shows up in a search result or while users browse the site, that intel will include a link to your website.

Searching will be based on a cascading tag-based directory.  Their FAQ explains it this way:

It’s a directory, but based on cascading tags rather than categories. On the landing page, you have the 20 most popular tags. Click on a tag, and you then get the 20 most popular tags that also have the first tag. And so on.

For example, if you click on "cars" at the landing page, the next page might have a list of secondary tags such as "imported", "used", "classic", "hybrid", etc. Click on "imported" and the subsequent page might have a list of tertiary tags such as "German", "Jaguar", "Lexus", etc.

Matching websites and intel will be displayed on each page: websites first, intel second.

If you have the time, register for an account at http://techfun.qassia.com – yea, I do get a credit for you signing up from my page.  I can’t do anything with the credits right now, but someday maybe I could buy an ad for the TechFun blog on the Qassia homepage.