ChaCha Ditches Guided Search Model. I Love To Hate This Startup
Written by on March 31st, 2008 in Ajax News.
Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched - search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid.
The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t (see image to right), and ChaCha still had to pay all those guides.
Today, according to an email sent to ChaCha’s guides titled “The Future Is Here,” they announced that guided search will be discontinued in favor of the one product they offer that isn’t monumentally dumb - mobile search. They claim that “new users are growing at a staggering rate every day” (most likely due to cell phone spamming).
So what happens to all the guides who worked on desktop search? Some of them, at least, can now apply for new positions on the mobile product.
The full email is below, and details of the company and their funding are here. Thanks Luke Kling for the tip.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/261699639/