New Scientist (Dec. 4) -- DataSift is new kind of search engine that uses crowdsourced human intelligence to answer vague, complex or visual questions, even when the users are not sure what they are searching for. "Take someone like my mother," says its developer Aditya Parameswaran of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "She has recently purchased this piece of electronic equipment which has a port that she has no idea what to do with. With DataSift, she can just take a photo of the port and say 'find me the cable that works with this'."