ChaCha is a meta search engine that offers a unique twist–it has guides that can help you find information via live chat. It’s a worthy stopover in the Life without Google experiment.
To test out the people aspect of the search, which is really the main selling point, I picked a topic that wasn’t way difficult but not easy either. My mission: Find blog posts related to Andrew Morton, a Linux programmer at Google. Here’s my search.
These human results aren’t instant, which can be a problem is you’re impatient.
The chat session tells me to keep my patience as Ryan a guide looks for the goods. He also asks questions to refine the search.
Ryan turns up a result that wasn’t perfect, but was something I wouldn’t have found on my own. You can also rate the guide.
A look at the video results on a search for Andrew Morton. Four results were relevant from what I can tell. Others less so. I found the video wall on the right way annoying.
The news results were functional, but I found the presentation a bit lacking. It would be helpful if things were grouped together better. Here’s a search on AMD’s benchmarking issues
The audio search was also an interesting twist. You can also play the audio right from your browser. One gripe: Dates weren’t given so the only way to know the podcast date is to click. You may get an old podcast as I did.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief at Celonis. He was most recently Vice President, Editorial and Editor in Chief at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, and The New York Times. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.
