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Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha
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."
For the former president of a company to be so prescient so as to recognize ChaCha's innate superiority to the number one worldwide search engine.
I honestly didn't know anyone used ChaCha for anything besides screwing with the people. There have been epic forum threads based on ChaCha.
I'm imagining a bunch of "guides" searching Google for you instead of letting you do it yourself.
Seriously though, who knows? Maybe enough people suck at searching to make this service worthwhile, but I don't see how it could ever be profitable. Unless they somehow think they can get away without paying anybody.
Um, maybe because public employees are being forced to donate labor toward a private company the university president has glaring conflict-of-interest ties with?
Other than that...
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
This article cites the benefits of having a human guide such as
"IU's guides could be asked to locate a building on campus", (use a campus map)
"find a book in one of the university's libraries" (use a library web page)or
"solve a question about Windows Vista (use Microsoft s knowledge base)".
Then IU does the asinine thing of replacing search results compiled by google appliances with human filtered ones. How much revenue does this give to cha-cha?