Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Search Powered By People

New Engine 'ChaCha' Offers Real-Time Answers From Live 'Guides'
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060904-044533

I think this has too much overhead to be successful, but it's fairly close to the user-supplied search and text message idea we discussed a couple of month's ago. I think you have to find a way to recruit "guides" and provide them with non-financial incentives only.

I liked the "best LA hotel to stay in with kids" questions. It's those kind of questions that highlight the limitations of search even in this day and age. Unless you've stayed at such a place, chances are you meet the asker's expectation.

1 comment:

Jake of All Trades said...

Agree that the "best LA hotel to stay with kids" is a great type of question to ask this type of search engine, so it was a little disappointing they just used an aggregator. Then again, that's all we really did at iNet, with some human intelligence to mentally filter some results before providing them to the client.