Cha Cha - Will They Challenge Google?
Can human aided searches be a differentiator?
A lot of search firms–including ChaCha–sure hope so.
ChaCha is a meta search engine that offers a unique twist--it has guides that can help you find information via live chat.
On the surface ChaCha is nothing more than a metasearch engine compiling results from the big players–the usual suspects like Google and windows Live Search.
"ChaCha is the ultimate fusion of computer technology & human intelligence. Live human guides are available to provide additional assistance. - The human brain.
ChaCha's goal is to provide a better search experience by combining results that are hand-picked by our knowledgeable human guides with the best computer-generated search results. In those cases where you can't find what you need with our instant results, ChaCha will connect you with a live human guide who will find the information for you through an instant messaging-style search session."
So what’s going to make ChaCha different? People. If you’re looking for something specific you can click for a live chat with a ChaCha guide. I tried it a few times and found it moderately helpful. Keep in mind these were just tests.
There was a service like this back in the dotcom days (I've completely forgotten the name of it now) that I thought might be good, but went belly-up.
It turns out that only you know exactly what you're searching for and you'll spend almost as much time explaining it to someone as you will searching for it.
I got an invitation to another one of these ("Spock") and wondered what value it would have. But the first thing they wanted me to do was to give them my password to other social networking sites so that they could suck down my contacts.
No, thanks.
Dan
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Derrick, it's not likely that ChaCha will challenge Google. The economies of scale are just not in their favor.
If everyone who used Google, decided to use ChaCha for searches and then used the people-aided search feature, ChaCha would need about a million employees on call to handle the searches.
And if people didn't want to use the people-aided search, then why use ChaCha at all? Just keep on using Google.
I personally don't see a bright future for ChaCha, unless they are content being a small "boutique" search engine.
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