A couple years ago I was brainstorming as I’m prone to do and I came up with this idea that I thought was utterly ingenious. I was thinking about search engines and started wondering what would happen if you let a human do the searching for you instead of the computer? It’d be similar to a private investigation company except it’d gather information for you on any subject. You’d just have to email them a query and wait for a time until they emailed you back the results of their detailed research. They’d sift through bullshit results for you and only return relevant information, often from different sources. Of course, something like that would need to be staffed by a large number of net savvy people familiar with the current goings on in the Web 2.0 environment.
ChaCha is not that service. It’s a new way of searching that involves you registering with the ChaCha site and initiating a live chat dialog with a representative that’ll search a subject for you. It’s supposed to work better than Google and Yahoo, but you know there’s a problem when the first screen shot you see over at Tech Crunch is a guide replying to a user looking for a UK Digg alternative with the question “What’s Digg?”. I’ve never used it myself but there’s already a huge list of grievances in a thread at Crunch. Amusingly, someone just invested $10 million into this calling it a “game changing equation”. I love the disillusioned.
