This came over the School of Informatics wire this morning: An informatics professor has created a search engine faciliated by human beings.
According to the press release, ChaCha is “the first search engine to instantly connect users with people to produce relevant results.” Co-founded by Scott Jones — an inventor of a voicemail system used by a half billion people — and Brad Bostic, ChaCha is an Alpha version of a search engine that connects users searching for information with live human guides. The idea is that humans would be able to filter for the most relevant search results. These guides — a workforce drawing largely from stay-at-home parents — will earn up to $10 per hour.
A couple reactions …
First, there is this problem:
That was the message that greeted me when I tried to find a human guide by going to the site. I know this is “Alpha” version, but I would think scalability is going to be a real problem. Can you imagine having to wait for a Google guide everytime you referenced that search engine? Multiply that by the number of users, and what has been developed is a bunch of bottlenecks. I wonder what the acceptable ratio is between guides and users that would make the service worthwhile.
Second, what prompted this? Was it a user survey or some demand by frustrated Googlers? “We wanted to solve the problem search engine users are experiencing with existing services — that is, the massive volume of search results they must sift through online,” said Jones. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find modern search engines to be incredibly helpful in almost every situation. This isn’t the days of old Alta Vista searches where your ideal page is #521 on the list. So, is this ChaCha really meant to be a secondary market of searches, where you go when you are frustrated trying to find something else? Would a helpful librarian be able to do the same?
Third, there is this tidbit from Inside INdiana Business:
In addition, once a guide reaches a pre-determined experience level, they are allowed to invite other guides to join and can then make 10 percent of the invited guides’ earnings.
I got to the “experience level” part and immediately thought pyramid scheme. Or the completely legal version of the same. Yuck. Or great, if you jump in now.
