Techcrunch just featured a very interesting new search company, ChaCha.

Its basic idea is that your search query gets forwarded to a “Guide” who supposedly is an expert in what you’re looking for, or at the very least, knows which sources to use to provide you with relevant results. ChaCha provides a little chat window left to your typical search interface which lets you communicate with the “Guide” it determined for your query. Basically they’re crowdsourcing search, putting it onto something like the mechanical turk.
But how does ChaCha ensure expertise, or more precisely: Why should I trust their guides? From ChaCha’s About section:

The primary reason is that we pay them and their pay is directly related to their performance. At the end of every session, you can select between one and five stars to rate their performance. While we expect you to be honest when rating a Guide, ChaCha can also detect any needlessly malicious ratings.

Another reason is that everybody knows a lot about something - ChaCha is able to connect you with the somebody who knows the something you want to know. Not only can they point you in the right direction, we’ve often found that communicating with a Guide can expand your general knowledge on the subject or even turn you on to new or different information that’s even more relevant to what you’re searching for.

I agree that many people “know a lot about something” (I wouldn’t say everybody), yet the real question is whether someone who can be considered an expert really would earn her money with such a job. I’m not convinced.

While I nevertheless do believe that this model theoretically could provide some interesting results, I think the actual problem here is that it doesn’t scale financially. I gave it a try and asked my “Guide” about how much she ’s getting paid for each search - it’s $0.80. This potentially could be a good deal for the guide, yet I don’t see how it should work for ChaCha. Given that even Google is assumed to make (in this context) only $0.20 per search from ads, ChaCha obviously would need to start generate at least 4 times as much as Google from each search before they run out of funding (according to SearchEngineJournal around $6 million) - I’m all for optimism, but this is crazy.

: ChaCha, Search, Crowdsourcing, Google,

Thanks for visiting my blog! If you like it, subscribe to my RSS feed or share this post via one of the social media services below.