ChaCha Search Engine – want a real human?
Today I’ve stumbled upon a very interesting search engine called ChaCha. Search Insider Blog detailed on a human powered search, where real people search for your queries.
That got me a bit surprised, so I loaded my screenshot capture app, created a new folder and went off to explore. Pretty soon a very friendly interface met my eyes. Very modest, Google style in nature. It seems that Google interface has been copied all over the web.
Once landed, I quickly did a search for “bats” and ChaCha search engine gave me regular, indexed results. I went to the home page and this time clicked on “search with guide”, which sure enough took me to the registration page. I quickly filled out everything, confirmed the mail and the next thing was Brandon Greeted me.
Status: Connecting …
Status: Looking for a guide …
Looking: …
Status: Brandon has connected to help you with your search on bats. Please wait while your guide searches for your results.
Brandon: Welcome to ChaCha!
Brandon: Hello! What are you looking for on this topic today?
You: hey how are you there
Brandon: Good, thank you
Brandon: Yourself?
You: =))) wonderful, thanks.
You: looking for bats
Brandon: All right
Brandon: I am currently searching for your results, thanks for waiting!
You: ok
The idea I had was to give the Operator choice between baseball bats and flying bats and see how good he will do. I also researched both a bit, so in case we went along with animal bats, ChaCha Operator would have to search for “Molossidae bats”. In case we went along with baseball, ChaCha agent would search for “Hillerich & Bradsby bats from 1950 – 1980”
Brandon: I am having technical difficulties. Transferring you to another guide.
Transfer: You are being transferred to another guide who can help you search even better!
Status: Looking for a guide …
Status: Toni has connected to help you with your search on bats. Please wait while your guide searches for your results.
Toni: Welcome to ChaCha!
Toni: Hi I will be helping you with your search.
You: hey there
Brandon didn’t seem to find anything so I got Tony instead. Tony seemed to cut it right off to the point and asked me some more.
Toni: Could you please be more specific as to the exact information that you are seeking?
You: bat old ones
You: Hillerich & Bradsby bats
Toni: baseball
You: 1950s and up to 1980s
You: yeppp =)))
At this point I decided to go with the baseball bats, since baseball seemed a bit trickier then the other.
Toni: Certainly one moment please.
Couple of minutes later, ChaCha interface started popping up websites on baseball bats. It took Tony about a minute to find the first result, while a total of about 3 minutes for all of them.
You: thanks
Toni: Are these results sufficient?
You: yes you hit the sweet spot =)))
I got six results in total, which surely enough had the bats I was looking for. Some of them had information I needed, some were selling vintage bats from 50s.
Actual results:
The Batting Cage: Collecting World Series and All Star Game Bats
Mastro Auctions Completes Another Industry Classic
Timeline of Baseball
This is one seemed a bit off topic.
Since it seemed to end pretty fast, I decided to poke Tony a bit more and find what exactly this ChaCha place is.
You: do you guys google over there? =)))
Toni: yeah me!
Toni: No not often but once in a while
You: pretty fun searching with a person
You: get a lot of people?
Toni: I am going to close and assist others. Thank you for using ChaCha. The results will remain for you to review.
Toni: It is a lot of fun
Toni: We are hoping to get busier. We are actually independents
Toni: So thanks again and please continue to use us
You: ok bye
As Tony stated ChaCha is run by independents who work on their on their own time.
Here is how guided ChaCha search looks like.
How does it work?
According to numerous sources, ChaCha guides get paid $5 per search hour, when they reach “pro” status. It is not clear how soon that status is earned, but people say it does not take long. You only get paid for search time, that is when you are connected to the person, doing actual searching. ReadWriteWeb says there around 10.000 search guides, all independents, working from home. Start whenever you want to, work as long as you want to and leave whenever you want. Seems pretty interesting. Though $5 does not seem like a lot in the western world, Eastern European countries, African Union States and other poorer nations will definitely benefit more from having such a part time job.
Now if you do the math, $5 to 10.000, aussuming only half of the people work an hour per day, turns out to $50.000 per day from ChaCha?
How exactly does ChaCha make money?
There are a number of Google sponsored text ads that run side by side, but it seems they ought not to generate too much profits for ChaCha. So what is going on?
ReadWriteWeb speculates that ChaCha founders are training AI en mass scale.
“ChaCha: The more you use ChaCha, the smarter and faster ChaCha becomes! Because ChaCha indexes all the questions that are asked and associates them with the search engines and resources used by Guides, and the links visited by the users, ChaCha knows where to look and what the best human-approved resources are for each question or topic.”
“This is a unique, interesting and clever twist on search. The entire human sifting process is leveraged to train the automated engine to create, in essence, an equivalent of a page rank. With time, ChaCha will get better and better - because more quality search results will be discovered. For this to succeed, the number of guides needs to scale with the amount of new information online - which is not simple. But we have to assume that the ChaCha company has a plan for that. If it works, we’ll get what I think will be the first example of AI training done on such scale.” - ReadWriteWeb.
This is a very interesting and existing concept. It seems that ChaCha got some pretty big sponsors, willing to invest heavily in the project, but can it be Google killer? I have to say Google is alarmed. If you go to Google and search for ChaCha – you will get wiki describing the dance, which is OK and some other results with ChaCha search nowhere in sight. Refine it a bit and search for “chacha search”, still no ChaCha on the horizon. Lets go ahead a do in your face chacha.com. The first result is the Search Engine Watch, followed by underground.chacha.com, with no direct results to the ChaCha homepage.
This got me thinking, don’t get me wrong, but from what Search Engine Watch found out(long ago) – it’s damn competitive.
# Best Thai food in Los Angeles: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
# How many smartphones will there be in 2010 in the US: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
# Best non-toxic household cleaning products: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
# Thanksgiving recipes: ChaCha, Google, Yahoo
Better then Yahoo! in my opinion.
I wouldn’t think that Google would do that, after all it is very democratic in terms of sending traffic to direct competitors, so it might be simple page rank in action. Regardless, ChaCha does have a lot of potential if exposed to larger audience.
- It’s search is accurate.
- You can get humans to search.
- Interface is very friendly to the eyes(some search engines look really repelling)
The only negative I found was the speed of ChaCha search. Being spoiled by Google’s “0.023 seconds 13,400,000 results” it can get quite annoying waiting for results to show up(in indexed search). Of course guided search is a different story.
Is ChaCha going to get more traffic? More users and more money? I think they’re on to a brilliant idea and I wish them luck. It can get tough competing with the big 3 and real innovation seems to work best.
Regardless of whether they will pose direct threat to Google or Yahoo in the future, their AI training will cost more then enough to satisfy the investors.
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