Watch: Want to know Iceland's secrets? Don't ask Google, #AskGudmundur

The Icelandic tourist office has launched what it calls "the world’s first human search engine" in a cheeky promotional campaign that invites visitors to ask a real-life, honest-to-goodness person any travel questions they may have about the country.

Iceland tourism has gone old school. The Icelandic tourist office has launched what it calls "the world’s first human search engine" in a cheeky promotional campaign that invites visitors to ask a real-life, honest-to-goodness person any travel questions they may have about the country.

Iceland-s-AskGudmundur-campaign-YouTube

Instead of 'Googling' their question, for instance, why not #AskGudmundur, one of the most common first names in Iceland, claimed by more than 4,000 men and women.

That’s out of a national population of 329,100.

Watch Inspired by Iceland’s Ask Gudmundur campaign video, here:

Their latest tourism campaign builds on the marketing tradition of personalizing the Icelandic travel experience.

In 2011, President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson famously issued an open invitation to visitors for a pancake breakfast at the presidential residence as part of a tourism campaign that encouraged locals to likewise open up their own homes and offer an authentic local travel experience to tourists.

The concept also takes a page out of the playbook of Ikea, which last fall poked fun at the digitized world when it launched the bookbook, “a device so simple and intuitive, using it almost seems familiar.”

The promo was for its latest catalog.