Google recently was discovered to be testing out a Digg-like style of voting to determine relevant search results.  Last February, I suggested that Digg could directly compete against Google by making their own search engine and leveraging their users to vote the search engine results up or down [Pulse 2.0: How Digg Could Compete With Google].  The Google voting model will be tested within Google Labs for about 3 weeks.

However, there is a search engine that focuses on such a model and its called Sproose.  Sproose has been developing this model for about 2 years and went live in August 2007.  “Sproose allows users to vote up the search results, the more users vote a site the higher up in the results it will move. Sproose takes this model a step further also improving the results by the community and sharing the vote histories with others of like interest [source: press release sent to Pulse 2.0].”

Sproose was started by Bob Pack, a former VP of Sales for Scholastic Inc.  The company is based in Danville, Calif.