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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."
It appears ChaCha is Very Quality
It reminds me of one of failed DotBomb era projects.
anyone else notice that the format is exactly like googles?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I had the pleasure to interview with ChaCha early this year, my general feeling is that they certainly have potential to shake things up in the search engine market (No this is not a paid spot, I did not take the job).
/.ers above have.
As you might suspect I am under a NDA about their technology and can not comment specifically. I will say that everyone I met there at the "Yellow House" has a vision to grow ChaCha into a powerful player in the market. From what I could tell the work environment at ChaCha is everything one might imagine of what I would call a Web 2.5 company, a very relaxed work place conveying an environment of productivity, creativity, and professionalism. Ultimately I choose to pursue a different career path; it was a tough decision that I may grow to regret in the next couple years. I look forward to seeing the technologies in the development pipeline come to fruition.
The final assessment (at least mine) and perhaps the reason for this post is to point out that ChaCha's technology is nothing to laugh at. Their vision for the future of search could--and has been--called revolutionary. I wouldn't be so quick to discount them as some of the
Only thing ChaCha is really useful over Google is for the 'epic lulz'. Messing with ChaCha guides is amazing, and I bet the university will stop using ChaCha guided searches when a bunch of students start asking for pictures of lemonparty. Hint: they couldn't actually ban someone from the service last I checked. ;)
Seriously though, who knows? Maybe enough people suck at searching to make this service worthwhile
Given that much of modern intellectual life has degenerated into seeing who can come up with the best Google searches [or PubMed searches, or arXiv searches, or whatever], how does hiring someone to do your searching for you differ from hiring someone to write your term papers for you?
As speaking from Columbus next door, IUPUC has its head stuck up their asses when it comes to IU mandate.
Back in 2001, we had 350 MHz machines with 128 and 256 MB. They mandated us with a switch from NT4 (which worked great and kept games and crap off) to 2000. Slow-city. A year and a half later, we were mandated for XP. For the same FARKING machines.
They also had serious problems with Windows Messenger spam coming from within the IU network. Of course, the drop-dead easy solution of turning off Windows Messenger service was too above their comprehension to do.
Next, the uni uses ADS and Kerberos for auth. IUPUC auths with ads.iupui.edu over a T-1. Guess what happens when you flood the T-1? Nobody logs in. I tried to tell them, but they learned the hard way when a bunch of techies from the IU side kazaa-ed the T-1 down. Heads rolled, and they finally took my suggestion: dont disable local guest or admin. Just password them heavily in that authorized people could still use the doorstops... computers.
Pretty much, you end up with "If you cant do, teach. If you cant teach, work in IT."
Coming from a CompSci dropout. Chem is better by far.
And a side note: No wonder they fired the old IU president. Guess the old one wouldnt take kickbacks.
ChaCha is based in Indiana (Carmel, to be exact). It's just the a state government's natural prejudice towards putting money back into the state economy. That could be one of the reasons IU has switched to it, given that it's a public university. By the way, I use IU's Google search quite often, and it sucks. Badly. You can't find anything you're looking for. Perhaps it's the nature of the information their site has, but they probably think that ChaCha will work better.
Because no one leaves the Board of a Directors of a company that they think is going to be successful and does a HUGE favor like this, and receives nothing in the end. Since they are not a publicly traded company, their financials don't have to be disclosed either, so no one has any way of verifying this without some sort of official investigation. Even without direct proof, it is still a huge conflict of interest in mine, and many other people's opinions.
Intranets and The Internet are two different beasts when it comes to search. Intranet pages are much more tightly controlled, the set of all pages is quite sparse, and the "importance" of a page doesn't necessarily correspond to its value as a search result. PageRank (even tuned for these conditions) just isn't as effective as it is on the public Internet; you want to tune search results for each organization based on how people actually use their intranet. I think the Google Search Appliance actually does this (refining the order of its results based on clickthroughs) but I'm unsure.
In my company (a very big and globe-spanning one), our intranet search is more-or-less useless. However, many people use an internal social bookmarking application. Searching this set of links is leaps and bounds more useful, and tends to return the result I'm looking for in the first half of the first page. A lot of these links are on obscure little pages hidden away on our massive intranet, which describe, say, how to fill out a massive form the right way, or how to hack around a particular quirk in our IT infrastructure. In other words, things that employees think are important, rather than things that management thinks are important.
Which is not to say that I think ChaCha at IU is a good thing. By all accounts this situation sounds like a terrible conflict of interest. However, I don't think that simply pointing Google at your organization's intranet is going to solve all your problems; instead, you want a smart blend of automated page ranking and social filtering to get around the problems caused by the (relatively) smaller sample set.
What's your problem?
Did someone tell you to expect a check but didn't warn you that you had to deposit it with a bank in order to use it?
Besides, you are a fine one to be bitching that the meaning of a word has changed due to popular usage.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What strikes me is the incredible hubris of the guy. He's abusing his position at the University for personal gain. He's drafting University employees to work for a venture that pays him money and pays them nothing. Must be nice. I wonder if the University gets anything at all in return?
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
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