ChaCha
December 7, 2007Has anybody tried ChaCha yet?
ChaCha is a new search engine which has a “Search with Guide” option. They advertise themselves as an alternative to Google because they have “experts” to help you find sources, if you need them. To use the guide option you just sign up, takes a few minutes at most.
ChaCha defines itself as a…
“LIVE GUIDED SEARCH – Instant search not cutting it? One click hooks you up with a live ChaCha Guide. A real person that will ask you questions, understand exactly what you want, and send you results that are dead-on. Computers can’t do that. It takes a community of people who are motivated to help you get the answer you seek – no matter what it takes. The brainpower behind ChaCha.”
This is direct competition with libraries, isn’t it?
Well, not yet at least. I have used ChaCha (writing a paper that has to do with online question and answer sites) a few times. Each time I was shocked at what are the so-called experts (5-10 dollars a “research” hour experts I seem to recall) are recommending. I actually had a race against them a few times to see what websites they would come up with and ones that I would. I am happy to say I won every time.
No reference interview takes place and, it seems, to be an expert one has to simply know how to type in keywords to Google. I read an article (sorry I don’t have the link handy at the moment here it is) by an ex-ChaCha guide in which he wrote something along the lines that 90% of the questions are pranks.
Another article I recently came across told of a 10 million dollar investment in ChaCha by the state of Indiana. What is this? That 10 million dollars would build an awesome library statewide IM reference center/interface and get the news out about it too. Getting info out is probably the hardest part in fact, need to look into marketing ourselves much better.
ChaCha isn’t very good, but is this the future of search engines? What does that mean to online reference?
Mostly what I was hoping for is for people to try this and report back. Get a couple reference questions and see if they do better than us. If you want to read some interesting/funny experience with ChaCha TechCrunch has forum in which people have submitted transcripts of interviews.
Have fun with it if you have the time.
I don’t have the time right now, but I’ll look at it later. I like your comments about racing with them and finding better resources. I wonder if Indiana gave funding to this service because they recognized the problems with robot-based search engines like Google, but just plainly didn’t think of libraries as human-based ’search engines.’ Makes me think of the 05 OCLC report (Perceptions…) which showed that people overwhelmingly associate the library ‘brand’ with books. Do librarians lobby? I haven’t looked much at what the various library associations do, but it seems as though library associations should dedicate some resources to lobbying, on top of other types of marketing…