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Tuesday, January 09, 2007

ChaCha.com - A social search engine

Do you feel lonely while doing your research using your favorite search engine? Guess what. You don't have too anymore because ChaCha.com is here to guide you and it is not any regular search engine. Despite using a complex search result algorithm, ChaCha.com uses human touch to guide your search in a real time.

ChaCha provides two ways of searching method. A normal search that shows a list of results. And their cool service is the search guide driven. They said that every time a query submitted an alert is sent to all appropriate Guides who are currently signed in to the system. Now who are this people and can we trust them. They claim that their Guides is knowledgeable in the topic you're searching but since they are still new most of the time you will be connected less knowledgeable but still an expert in internet search and will most likely find you exactly what you need.

Sound interesting, doesn't it? So I decided to test it myself. I ask a topic about Chinese New Year Zodiac animal and the Guide who accepted the query respond in a few seconds and he/she reveals the results. One of the url of course pointing out to the Wikipedia. After that the guide asked if I like to find out more about the topic and when you satisfied with your result the guide session will end.

I also check the ChaCha underground, a directory of ChaCha's guides group in several categories. Once I browse through the Guides profile page, I'm sure that these Guides are really human. I wonder how much they get paid?

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