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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."
Does ChaCha have its own engine or does it rely on all the other ones? The "personal service" feature will die-off if enough people try to use it.
If they were forcing people to not use google search, that would be news. But who cares about this ?
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.
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....
Ever been to Bloomington? It's a pretty beautiful place. Most of the cities in the US (NYC especially) were built out of Limestone from the surrounding quarries. Beautiful limestone hills, tons of wildlife, lakes, trees, fields, flowers etc.. It also has amazing culture, the #2 music school in the country (behind Juilliard), very good and diverse restaurants, very diverse population. The Dalai Lama's brother actually lives in Bloomington, and the Dalai Lama visits every few years (this year is one of those years). I've lived in the bay area, traveled to most of the lower 48, and currently live in Manhattan - and even with that perspective Bloomington is one of my favorite places I've been. You can continue to hate though if you like....
Wouldn't it be better just to give out a phone number to connect you to the "next available operator"? At least have the site play some nice Muzak while you wait for the results. Interrupting with the occasional "All our operators are currently occupied. Your call will be answered in the order received. Please hold."
"Paid guides"
I can see where this will lead. Nothing like a little "commission" to influence said "guide".
And I think Bezos should let what's left of his hair grow out, get a perm, and dye it bright red.
What?
Hmmmm, free tech support! And we all know how well people doing tech support are treated.
So, they stick a bunch of people with tech support responsibilities
And yes, that is what will happen.
The only way this will survive is when the "support" people start telling their "customers" to purchase 3rd party software and such from companies that have purchased "ad time" on those "support" people.
"Hello, I'm running Windows Vista and it won't boot up."
"Have you tried the extreme refreshment of Mountain Dew? Many people who use Windows Vista prefer Mountain Dew."
"Will that help me fix Vista?"
"It might. It couldn't hurt. May I also recommend some Dominoes Pizza?"
"Thanks, I'm not hungry."
"Dominoes Pizza is having a special offer today on pepperoni pizzas."
"Okay, I'll order some pizza. How about my Vista problem?"
"Symantec sells a wide range of software products designed to facilitate and enrich your Vista experience."
click
What does a Gnome icon theme have to do with Latin American dances or search engines? Now I'm thoroughly confused.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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
It does look like a conflict of interest here but I guess there's none at IU with the balls to go up against the new IU President. Next thing you know, he's going to force everyone to use Windows Vista along with Microsoft Office 2007. Oh, and collect a nice check from Microsoft to go along with his check(s) from ChaCha.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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. ;)
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?
It's like I always say, "Why can't the world be more like a Frank Herbert novel."
Well actually, not always. But once, in my head, while typing. I didn't give much thought to punctuation, though.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
At least google gets the answer to the most important question in the world right. It IS "42"!
Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha.
If they took a page (ahem!) out of Google's book and used pigeons instead.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'll take Indiana over 95% of the rest of the USA. It's a beautiful place to live, especially in the south. Rolling hills, forests, lakes, caves, wildlife, it beats the city any day.
Gone!
Beavis: Diarrhea, ChaChaCha
Butthead: Diarrhea, ChaChaCha
Daria: You guys seriously need to get a life.
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?
for ChaCha
Me thinks, this ChaCha may become a very big yawn after a short while && AI search optimization may be the future. Google and M$ apparently are knitting on it.
Seems ChaCha already has a bottleneck with CPU acquisition:
Please note, due to the thousands of applications we receive each week, we will respond to you as quickly as we can, but please be patient as we search for outstanding individuals to join our growing community!
Puffing up egos: "Outstanding individuals"....pffff!
Indiana's government website also uses Cha Cha. Coincidence? I think not. http://ingov.chacha.com/search/query?query_text=
Googlebotter: It's people. IU Search is made out of people. They're making their index out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding them like cattle for links. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
Slashdotter: I promise, bottie, I promise. I'll tell the geeks.
Googlebotter: You tell everybody. Listen to me, Slashdotter. You've gotta tell them! IU search is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!
The same thing that network file systems have to do with Samba, I think.
My blog
Yahoo was a directory, like a yellow pages. Chacha is search combined with chat. If you can't find something you will talk to a real person.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
http://xkcd.net/155/
Link should speak for itself.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
The only reason why IU is interested in ChaCha is because it was started by Scott A. Jones who is an IU grad (and also the founder of Gracenote).
The thought of making library and tech support people essentially chacha employees is a bit disturbing but students and faculty have been able to contact them through chat and instant messenger so perhaps it won't really make any difference as long as only IU people can contact them.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Great, so some fucks at one shitheel company are trying to get it over the fucks at another shitheel company. Yawn. The only thing interesting here is the lack of ethics at IU.....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Former CEO of some defense company becomes Secretary of Defense and approves multi-billion dollar contract to that company?
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.
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.
To report a conflict of interest involving an employee of the State of Indiana, click here.
Relevant documents:
finally, we'll get the answer to the question, "what do women want?"
Yeah, I highly doubt that. IU has Macs all over the place. Their tech store obviously caters more to the Mac crowd. This post is just another fantastic example of morons on /. pulling shit out of their ass and managing to bash Microsoft along with it.
It seems that McRobbie has been at IU for some time now. He even implemented a plan in 2000 to replace all IU computers every 3 years.
http://chronicle.com/free/2000/11/2000112901t.htm
Doesn't that seem like a short cycle. Their reasoning is that the warranty for the PC is 3 years so therefore, a 3 year replacement cycle... Silly me for thinking that just because the warranty is up doesn't mean you should throw it out. I wonder if Microsoft's Software Assurance isn't involved here since that too is a 3 year cycle.
The good news is that he's been at IU for a while and didn't just come over from being on ChaCha's board. Still, seems like he might have financial ties to ChaCha and therefore have a conflict of interest.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I'd tell you to just F*(&'n Google it!
"I'm pretty sure that nobody gets graded on how good their searches are."
Contrary to popular opinion a respectable degree does not simply cram as many facts into your head as will fit. A university degree is supposed to give one the skills to find known answers to a question, any question!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
yes, I found that he's been at IU for over 7 years and didn't just jump into the IU Presidents position from the board at ChaCha. And you're right, I was just shooting from the hip since there wasn't enough info in the article to determine otherwise.
:-/
BTW, it's just too easy to bash Microsoft and besides, they deserve every bit of it they get. That's a fact and not opinion.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Clearly there is a conflict of interest to just mention one of the problems with this move. So how long will Michael McRobbie remain IU president. We should hold a raffle, or maybe a contest I bet he's a goner by November of this year :)
I've been trying to search for the Chode Compressor for the last hour and not one "guide" had been available. Pretty useless if you ask me.
I honestly didn't know anyone used ChaCha for anything besides screwing with the people. There have been epic forum threads based on ChaCha.
This is the first tyme I've heard of the Chacha SE, but now that I have I'll check it out, I frequently check out new SEs I hear about.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The problem though with these ideas is that I don't want to help search engines when I don't get paid.
This can work for top sites that specialize in your topic.
your right about ranking a billion pages.
Google is being spammed on some topics.
Yes the IU president looks corrupt but we all learn from Congress and our government.
I wouldn't read much into the three year thing, that's pretty much standard all over the western world. Over here in Australia it's got more to do with the 3yr depretiation of PC's for tax purposes than the 3mth - 1yr warranties.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
We aren't "forced" to use it but we can download Office for "free" and Vista Business costs $15 and Ultimate cost something like $20 or $25 at the bookstore.
I'm certain that Microsoft doesn't give IU faculty and students such a discount purely out of love. I would be willing to bet that we pay for it in one way or another.
By the time most people graduate they have been getting MS products legally for free or very cheap for so long they haven't tried anything else and just automatically keep using MS products.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Not too surprising to me being that ChaCha is based here in the Indianapolis area. I guess IU just likes to keep their searching local.
IU is really trying to be seen as a high tech school. Two years ago they were named the university with the best wireless (which of course doesn't exist in our department's building...) and they have a fairly highly ranked supercomputer. I would assume this is part of some attempt to make IU seem Web2.0 or something.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I was thinking Chode Compressor was a new internet joke I hadn't heard of yet so I googled it. Two hours after your comment google has already indexed it and you are the proud owner of the top link for chode compressor. Congrats sir!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
There are 2 elements to the bigger picture related to this story:
1. The overall quality of search still has a long way to go. Ask has tried to do some innovative things. Vivisimo is another great example. But even today it is difficult to get the specific information that you need. Search is in desperate need for a (r)evolution. Some geeks may not like the idea of The Algorithm being replaced by humans but think about it for a minute. What are all the huge indexes of search engines really worth? At the end of the day, even if Google finds 200,000 results for a query the users look at the first 4-5. Or maybe the top 10 results. How many users go beyond that? So eventually any search engine that displays good quality top 10 results is going to be a hit. Seems to me that people-powered sites like ChaCha and Wikia can do at least that.
2. Models like Wikia search engine and ChaCha and YouTube rely on user generated content. These sites have not sorted out the payment issue yet. The environment is ripe for a PayPal-like service to manage micropayments to users for all these sites. This service will tie up with all sites that want to compensate their users for content (or any other contribution). The users get a single account to manage these finances. This also makes the pot bigger for the user. The service can even create a virtual currency of their own.
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
Don't forget the number of horns on a unicorn.
Regards,
Steve
According to D.Adams 42 - but we are still checking the result.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I guess if you don't understand the math behind Google's pagerank then you might be unimformed enough to buy into the idea that people can "guide" you through billions of pieces of data...that are constantly changing.
I guess if you don't understand the math behind Google's pagerandk then you might be uninformed enough to not know that this is exactly what pagerank does!
People make decisions about what to link to what, and what to click on... and pagerank just observes and later regurgitates this info.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I came home the other night and the dog had eaten some foam packing from a parcel that had been delivered earlier that day. The girlfriend was very concerned about this to the point of phoning the vets (where she works) to check on out of hours availability.
I came in, looked at the foam and said "That's okay, it made from some kind of food stuff. Look when you put water on it, it kind of dissolves. She should be okay."
However, I had to prove it was safe and it is almost impossible to quickly use Google to get the answer (You get lots on packing for food stuffs not packing made from foodstuffs.)
ChaCha was the answer. I tried once, waited a bit and got someone who said it couldn't be fund and then clicked me off. But the second person was helpful, thorough and ultimately succeeded in finding a page which showed that you can get packaging made from cornstarch and the dog would not need surgery.
I could have been on Google for hours but ChaCha took all the pain out of it and did it quicker than I could. If ever I need something and can't face searching lists of search engines, reporting other search engines, reporting peoples web pages reporting the original search engine etc. etc. I go to ChaCha.
But as to how they get a business model out of it, I am none the wiser.
Conflict of [former] interest.
Pushing mediocrity upon the poor people who visit the University's website.
The stunning incompetency of the search service.
I'll disagree, but not for the same reasons. If you have a reference which contains something you want, you'll need to search out where to find it. Be it at your local library (thankfully, the most common case), on the Internet (and then roll the die to see if it's one of the ones your university has paid for.), or via interlibrary loan. (And hope it gets to you by the end of the semester, sometimes it won't even more than a month after the request is submitted)
If there's some critical piece of information that you should have included in your term paper, you might (and, honestly, should) get marked down. As such, one might well argue that it's your search that's at fault.
In a paper that's actually submitted, you'd BETTER know the subject, including what other people have done, and you'd better find those papers before you try to publish.
Perhaps the solution is to let the President work for Ca Ca full time?
Actually, my first semester of college I got stuck in a hybrid English course, which was half in-class and half online.
One of the things the professor tried to teach was how to effectively search, which I think is a fairly important skill.
Of course, that's about the only thing that I felt that class did well at... I dropped out of it after a couple weeks because I hated the professor and the curriculum and the fact that we were supposed to use some book he wrote about using the internet and it was obvious he knew only slightly more than average (which is to say, not very much at all) about it.
But I digress. I'll never understand why people have so much trouble using search engines and constructing an effective search statement, but I think it's quite possibly the single most important skill a person can learn. I think that it should be a part of high school curriculum, never mind college.
One could easily use the same logic to say that use of a secretary or executive assistant to do the things you don't have the time to deal with and still accomplish your primary objectives for the day.
I do think ChaCha is garbage, but I don't think it is cheating.
A final thought comes to mind that I didn't wedge in above: Today's students are a bit different than those of previous generations. I recall most students not having full-time jobs and getting far more than 4 hours of sleep a night between school/work/social activities back in my day. Anything to lessen the load and give a more accurate model of life in the professional world is a good thing.
Well, it's 42 according to the Google Calculator so it must be true.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
So what you're saying is, you blew the money-shot?
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
and to think that they were found guilty of anti-competitive tactics based on anti-trust laws yet still allowed to make sweetheart deals like those. Yes, let's rebuild Iraq just like America... :-/
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
They have moved to it as well, as ChaCha is a local Indiana company ( last i heard ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah, looks like it's exactly like Google but with a ton of ads ("sponsored links") disguised as search results. Do the following searches for "stokes scattering":
e ring&btnG=Google+Searchs +scattering&search=ChaCha+Search&tid=&rid=&mode=we b&page_num=1
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=stokes+scatt
http://search.chacha.com/search/query?query=stoke
Notice something? All of Google's links are (surprise) about stokes scattering. Compare with some of ChaCha's results:
1. Dignified Ash Scattering. Burial at sea in MidAtlantic New Jersey Waters, Family owned/operated.
4. Stokes Ringtones. Download Complimentary Stokes Ringtones Instantly.
8. Stokes. Over 11 million pieces of china, crystal & silver - old & new.
Thanks but no thanks, ChaCha. This is really disgusting. Here's the seventh link from a search on "raman scattering":
7. Raman Scattering. Find and Compare prices on raman scattering at Smarter.com.
It's Yahoo! Directory all over again, but this time misusing university employees to do the work.
Did anyone else notice the chacha looks nearly identical to google. Will definitely try it out.
And having the education to know when your monkey is feeding you bananas.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Google heartbroken, quoted as saying IU just looking for rebound date.
This won't fly for one very simple reason.
"I Googled it."
"I, uh... Cha-Cha'd... it."
I rest my case.
ChaCha is a joke, they always direct you to Wikipedia whenever possible (I guess there's worse things), and refuse to answer some questions (I live in Uruguay so they're worthless for me).
My brother had a blog post on ChaCha http://mrhathouse.blogspot.com/2006/12/maybe-not-
so let me quote: " When they can't direct you to the most obviously generic site, they start the trial and error process which consists in linking you to the most random pages hoping one of them contains the information you were looking for.
Not the best use for your time, we all know that Google didn't become a verb by linking people to garbage."
If the IU website is so horrible to search, why not maintain a local search engine for the website only? Also, do they know you can filter Google searches to only include results from a certain webpage?
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
ChaCha is based in Indianapolis and is backed by Scott Jones, a local tech entrepreneur who made his fortune as one of the co-inventors of voice mail. Given the relatively small number of tech companies in Indiana and the desire of the state to diversify its economy away from manufacturing, it doesn't seem too unreasonable that the state government and a leading university would back a home grown company.
In Indiana no one can hear you ChaCha, Cha.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
While no one can argue that google is a great tool for general web searches, the google-sponsored search within the main IU site is not really on the ball. Having access to a person familiar with the campus giving me a direct answer would be better than wading through pages of useless links to find any information at all. I'm not saying they should kill google altogether, but it would be nice to have a human alternative in aggravating situations when you just can't seem to find what you want.
You get graded on how well you integrate the results and show that you understand them.
Who created it? Why does it look similar to an Ask.com?
If you are going to use something that looks similar to Ask.com, why not use it?
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
So. A university president who is a public employee is going to force other public employees to donate time paid for by tax payers to enhance the profile of a private for-profit company that the university president has a board-of-directors interest (or former interest) in. Aside from the glaring conflict of interest, does anyone see a short tenure as university president in the cards for that over-educated idiot? Does anyone see lawsuits and possible criminal charges concerning misappropriation of State funds? Maybe the university president is spending too much time over at the bar enjoying happy hour.
Why do you think Goggle products are still in Beta?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Incoming L1 in the 2010 Law class at IU. Question one on Wednesday, August 22nd in my Ethics 101 class will be:
"What are the ethical implications of a former CEO of a floundering company taking a job at a new large institution and then mandating that it use the failing company's technology at a major increase in cost with negligible potential benefit and substantial increase in risk while still retaining stock in the previous company?"
So much for not being known as the smart ass at my new school.
Does anyone know how Cha Cha is really different from other "guide" or answer services like Google Answers?
-- $G
I dont know about anyone but other than the fact that it's not google it sucks, i tried searching some stuff and it does not understand "è" "é" it changes them so the search is fruitless.
If they insist on making it for just one language (english) it's bound to fail.
the only thing it had was the video search but hey! if you cant be better than google right there right now, you should not advertise
I think it's been called USENET for a while now. Operates on the same principle as Santa Claus and Jesus: ask, and ye shall receive.
I used it recently to find a PC Card-format USB hub that wouldn't physically block the second slot on my notebook. Not only did I get a link to exactly such a product within 24 hours, but my "guide" sold me his card for ten bucks delivered, in contrast to the $70 to $90 that people have been paying for it on eBay lately.
It seems that ChaCha offers a compensation plan of sorts, so why would it be "unlikely" that IU's staff would not received any money? Who is scarfing that money?
Wouldn't they do better to use Mahalo? Gives the same human guided search result for a particular keyword, but in a better, non ad filled way . . .
Here's a podcast (vodcast) of the press conference that explains the partnership in more detail. It's a little dry up until about 10:00 minutes (or 16:00 if you don't care about the genesis of ChaCha). https://oncourse.iu.edu/access/content/group/63494 4c1-c20e-4181-00bb-4a74f07be469/podcasts/IU%20and% 20Cha%20Cha%20Partnership%20Press%20Conference.m4v
Enjoy!