If you thought automation is the solution for everything, ChaCha will be a surprise for you. The twist is provides is if you are not happy with the search results, you can chat with a Search Guide. The Search Guide is a human who, as expected, guides you to find what you are looking for. Alex Iskold has a detailed review. Humans takeover where machines fail! It is quite established that the right balance between automation and manual intervention provides the maximum benefits. I think ChaCha will provide a gentle blow. Whether it can turn into a wind that will lead changes in the search space will depend on performance of the search guides. For ChaCha they have the additional responsibility of managing and supervising the 10,000 or so humans. Checkout the ChaCha Communities and their blog for more updates.


December 24th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
[...] I think it is great. In my opinion spamming exploits a loophole in the current search engine algorithms, since they are purely link based. Human contribution to these algorithms can fix these loopholes and probably work as the best solution for spamming. ChaCha is another search engine which has contributions from humans, but in a different way. [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 12:38 am
[...] about this, especially since human powered search engines are getting noticed. There was ChaCha with search guides, then Wikiasari where you could vote for good and bad pages and more recently [...]