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Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha

Posted by Zonk on from the forbidden-dance dept.

theodp writes "Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. The move was announced by new IU President Michael McRobbie, who until recently sat on ChaCha's Board of Directors (5-29 SEC filing, PDF). IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha, which IU notes is backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion."

5 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Big news ? by UbuntuDupe · · Score: 3, Informative

    How does using this software to provide help to students and faculty constitute donating labor to a private company? The summary says, "IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha"

    Basically, university staff will have to devote time (for which the university pays them) to do things to ChaCha's benefit, and ChaCha will not compensate them. I know, it wasn't immediately obvious from the summary, because whoever wrote it either:

    a) is old enough to associate ALL transfers of money with checks, and therefore uses them interchangeably despite the fact that the world has moved on, or

    b) is trying to sound folksy by using the metonym "check" to refer to ANY kind of monetary payment.

    I hate people who do that, with a passion, whichever set they belong to.
    --
    Apology to Ubuntu forum.
  2. I can't blame them... by jambarama · · Score: 3, Informative

    As a new IU student, let me say this can't hurt. This isn't too surprising to me, while google is great for getting valuable search results from gobs of pages, it really hasn't been designed or optimized to work with few pages. The IU results with the google search are so irrelevant they are worthless. This isn't a troll, I use google for web searches, but try it yourself here and search for course offerings, or course catalog, or list of courses. Garbage results mostly. I found the same was true of the BYU search--it was google and it was terrible.

    The summary sounds like there is a conflict of interest for sure, so I can't say ChaCha was the right replacement (ads mixed with search results?!? sounds evil to me). But I can say a replacement/fix/something had to be done.

    1. Re:I can't blame them... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      As some who does web development at a University with a Google Appliance, all I can say is blame the web developers. They're obviously not doing a good job naming pages, titling, linking, etc, so Google can pick up the clues to help people find things. It works great for us, and it can even be fine tuned so certain keywords can bring up certain pages automatically.

  3. 3 strikes by Fletch · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd never heard of ChaCha. I just did a search for the first time and noticed that 1) sponsored results are inline and poorly marked (there's some suble green "sponsored by" text within an otherwise ordinary looking search result). That might have been forgiven, but 2) the sponsored results for this particular query weren't actually very relevant. Then, when I tried to click through a real result I found that 3) they use javascript for their result links, and it's implemented in such a way that I can't command-click on a result and open it in a new tab (it does open in a new tab, but the original tab loads the result page, too).

    I won't be back.

  4. Clich here to report conflict of interest by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative

    To report a conflict of interest involving an employee of the State of Indiana, click here.

    Relevant documents: