Chacha.com, a Search Engine with an Interesting Twist

After hearing about Chacha.com on some other websites I became increasing intrigued by its business model & the services it was offering its customers. For those who haven't yet heard of Chacha, they are one of the first search engines to seriously undertake a human assisted approach to the online search engine industry. The company first opened up its service at the end of 2006, and it has been growing in popularity ever since. If you have not yet visited their site I would encourage you to try it as you may find it useful; on ChaCha's homepage you will immediately notice that there are two search boxes. One allows you to search and browse the results on your own. The other, however, allows users to 'search with a guide', where you can chat in real time with a ChaCha employee or 'guide' whom will help you find what your looking for; the guide then presents the results of his/her findings to the user in a matter of minutes.


The two entrepreneurs who began ChaCha, Scott Jones & Bradd Bostic, believed that by tapping into the power of knowledge and human intelligence they could offer a better search engine experience for online browsers - but is it really any better? To help me answer this question I ran a few of my own searches to gain a better understanding of the useability and effectiveness of the search engine. After, using various phrases and keywords I was able to draw a few conclusions about the companies services:

1. The service is great for people who are new to the internet who may have trouble finding what they are looking for, but it doesn't seem to offer any benefits to more advanced web searchers.


2. The searches can be a bit time consuming taking anywhere from 2-5 minutes or more.


3. The 'guides' are not necessarily educating or experienced on the topics you are searching on...they are however excellent at browsing the web.


4. It can be a great place to go if your lonely while your searching the web ;)

Overall, I would say this web site has some potential, but it needs to work out a few issues before it will be able to become a competitive search engine with the likes of google and yahoo. If the guides were more educated on the topics and keywords I believe ChaCha would have great potential as a future search engine. In the meantime, we'll just have to watch and see how the company evolves as it soon will be leaving the 'beta' stage of testing.