We’ve never been big fans of ChaCha, the human powered search engine that pairs you up with a “guide” who attempts to answer your questions in real time. The search model was obviously unscalable from the outset, but ChaCha’s botched implementation hasn’t helped much. When it first launched, ChaCha allowed users to initiate full on chat sessions with their guides, which predictably led to a flood of pranksters who overwhelmed the service.

After a year of trying to make the ridiculously flawed system work, the company abandoned the chat sessions in favor of one-off question and answers, primarily targeting users through a mobile service.

Despite its glaring issues, ChaCha has managed to ring up $16 million in funding, which is probably why it has survived this long. And to the company’s credit, it has amassed a following of loyal “guides” - the people who do the heavy lifting and find the search results for visitors to ChaCha.

Many of these guides are only interested in making a quick buck, which is why there are so many laughably bad search results. But for some, ChaCha is an extension of the workday, offering some relatively easy money to help supplement their incomes. And now ChaCha is going to screw them.

Yesterday ChaCha sent out a message to its guides explaining that it was introducing a “Pay-For-Performance” system that was designed to improve search quality - not a bad idea, given the shoddy results we’ve seen before. Unfortunately, it seems that ChaCha has blundered this plan too.

Under the new program, “Top Guides” will receive 20 cents per question, which has been the standard rate for experienced guides for some time. Everyone else gets 10 cents per question - half of what they would have gotten under the old system. To become a Top Guide, users must do the following:

* >95% Quality Measurement.
* 95% and above completion of answers to questions:
* Minimum 300 Searches a week.

That’s a lot of searches, given the fact that most experienced users average around one search per minute. In effect, ChaCha is forcing users to work five or more hours per week if they want the higher payrate - something that will totally alienate the site’s more casual (but accurate) users. What’s worse, there’s currently no way to readily see your accuracy score, so users are forced to trust ChaCha’s word.

Users are up in arms on the site’s private forum (you can see some of the complaints here), with many planning to abandon ChaCha entirely. It’s clear that ChaCha is trying to trim their workforce down to a small army of accurate and hardworking searchers, but enraging its entire community only seems to solidify its place in the Deadpool.

Stumpedia, a “human powered search engine” we’ve not covered before has added live search results ChaCha style.

This is how they spin it:

Stumpedia.com, the social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web is launching another human-powered search feature similar to the guided search model that was recently ditched by ChaCha.com. Our approach to the guided search model is dependent on crowdsourcing and the benefits of social media participation.

They don’t provide any details on their site, but given the “DOWNLOAD PLUG-IN SO YOU CAN ALSO ANSWER QUESTIONS” link on the page and the mention of crowd sourcing I think this translates to users also provide the live answers.

The wisdom of offering a service like this, unless simply a publicity stunt, is flawed: as we know 90% of the users on ChaCha were pranksters and as ChaCha eventually found out, the model doesn’t work. Stumpedia adds another dimension though to the process: now you can not only torment the person giving the answer, you can suprise those asking the questions as well, offering a whole new world of joke blog posts and corresponding screenshots.

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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Twelve days ago ChaCha, a controversial search engine that uses humans to answer search queries, rolled out a mobile version of the service. Ask it anything via text message, and they’ll send you an answer in a few minutes.

I tried the service once to test it, and haven’t used it since. But today I received a text message from them saying “Ever wish you could actually know everything? Now you do. Just text another questions to 242242 (ChaCha) for the answer now.”

This is pure spam, sent without my request or permission. Text spam is horrid - not only does every message actually cost the recipient money, but you can’t specifically block specific addresses like you can with email.

Text spam is coming to the U.S. (and anyone who’s lived in Europe already knows all about it), but for a respectable, venture funded company to do this is inexcusable. For anyone who tried the service based on my post about it, I apologize.

I was surprised this evening to receive an email from the ChaCha communications team about a new feature they’ve just launched. I say surprised because we have not been kind to the service in our three posts on them so far. In the most recent post, I called them “a bad idea, poorly executed.”

The new feature is a mobile interface to the search engine - try it virtually here. Users can text a search query to 242242 and receive text results back on their phone. Like the main ChaCha service, the answers are sent by a live search guide. For now, it’s free.

Example searches given by the company include “I’m at the corner of 42nd & Broadway in New York City. Where can I get a cup of coffee?” or even “Where can I get some great sushi in Palo Alto, CA?” ChaCha also says that shortcuts and misspellings are not a problem, since a real human is reading and responding to the message.

I texted “What is the temperature in New York City?” to the service (I’m flying there tomorrow). Within moments I received a text message back welcoming me to the service:

Welcome to ChaCha’s FREE txt trial! Your phone just got smarter. Ask away. Your first answer will come shortly. Std txt charges apply. Send HELP for help.

Four minutes later I got the following reply:

Current temperature is 17 degrees F, Clear, Wind: W at 10 mph, Humidity: 45%. Thursday 24 degrees F 16 degrees F. http://www.chacha.com/u/a6xii7j9

Useful? Definitely. Scalable? Not a chance. But the upside is that if you are ever lonely and have no one to text with, ChaCha guides are there for you. You’ll never be lonely again.

The company has raised $16 million in funding, including an investment from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions. Look for them to hit the deadpool by end of year 2008.

Just kidding, ChaCha. Keep me on the PR distribution list. I promise to be fair and balanced. On a side note, we have a running thread in the forums for people to post their most entertaining ChaCha guide exchanges.

It is rare to find a company offering such a game-changing disruptive equation, even in the context of giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

These are the words of Morton Meyerson, the man who just led ChaCha’s $10 million Series B round of financing.

What is ChaCha? It’s a new search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a search guide, via a chat interface. The search guide then returns results that are supposed to be more relevant than what Google, Yahoo and others provide.

The problem, as we’ve noted, that most people who go to the site are just screwing around (one ex search guide said 90% of the traffic is pranksters). And as you can see from the image, the search guides aren’t particularly knowledgeable about the web. In this case, the search guide answered a query about a UK version of Digg with “What is Digg?”

The fact is, ChaCha is a bad idea that has been poorly executed. In a sea of dumb startup ideas, ChaCha stands apart as more awful than just about all of the rest. And that didn’t change with today’s funding news. They simply went from being a bad startup, to a well funded bad startup.

As an aside, we have a long standing thread in the TechCrunch Forums where users are encouraged to post their most ridiculous ChaCha search experiences.

Update: Wow. That’s a fugly Comscore traffic chart. 24 million page views/month in January, down to 2 million in October. The good news is that it can’t possibly go much lower because it is not possible to have less than zero page views. Solid investment, Morton:

I’ve been hard on ChaCha, the new search engine that pairs users with a human guide to help them find better results (see this TechCrunch Forum thread as well). I was supposed to meet with the CEO of the company earlier this week but missed the appointment due to the flu. I really want to get their side of the story and present a balanced view of the startup. But for now, I just don’t see how human guides can ever match Google or Yahoo search.

In the meantime, negative tidbits about the company keep hitting my inbox. I came across this post by a former ChaCha guide, which claims that 90% of searches are done by pranksters.

I was also sent the screen shot to the left of a ChaCha search where the guide didn’t know what Digg was, and asked the searcher (original source seems to be here). You can’t expect the guides to know everything, since they’re paid $5 - 10/hour, but you won’t find Google asking you what Digg is when looking for a UK equivalent.

Lonely? Want someone to talk to? Go to ChaCha, a new search engine, and talk to a guide real time about your search. As long as you remain somewhat on topic, I’ve found that the guide will talk to you as long as you like.

There are two ways to search on ChaCha. They have a more traditional search engine that has good but not deep results. But the cool service is guide driven, via an instant message screen on the page. While I found that the results were not nearly as good as Google, it is a lot of fun to talk to the guides.

The company, which is based in Indianapolis, announced a $6 million round of financing today that included an investment by Jeff Bezos through his Bezos Expeditions fund (the same fund that invested in 37 Signals). This is a perfect fit for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk product, and I expect the company will be using that service at some point for the search guides.

While it isn’t clear to me how the company can make money inserting human labor into the search process, they now have at least $6 million to burn while trying. If you’d like to be a ChaCha guide, you can apply here.

As an aside, ChaCha has a linking policy that forbids linking to any page other than the home page. I’m not sure what misguided lawyer told them to do this, but I’ve blatantly violated that policy in this post, including by linking to the policy. Note to ChaCha - links aren’t bad and this policy isn’t enforceable.

Update: Here’s a post from Michael Wales, one of the ChaCha guides.