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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.
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'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.
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
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.
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?!
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.
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?
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.
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!
That's fine, but what is not fine is him making decisions in a position of power at IU that have a direct financial effect on a company he still likely receives payment in some form from. That is about as close to conflict of interest as you can get.
The same thing that network file systems have to do with Samba, I think.
My blog
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:
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.
"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.
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.
It benefits (arguably) both parties. Framing it as a favor to the company is prejudging what's going on. There's nothing in the actual FACTS presented that represents a conflict of interest. You (and many other people) may wish to presume that there is a conflict of interest, and hence corruption, involved; but it's still nothing more than presumption. As a matter of principle, I choose to presume innocence until there is evidence of guilt; as that is the presumption that I wish others to make when viewing my actions.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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
www.ra
That's the problem. You chose three words whereas I chose a slightly different three words.
Apparently these are called "peanuts" which I would never have guessed. I could have chosen Expanded or honeycomb instead of foam, and Foodstuff or food instead of edible and they would have given different answers. In fact, I did search for a while myself before I went to ChaCha and the first guide drew a blank and the second one finally got what I wanted. Having the human element is what helps this search engine because they can choose different phraseology to get different results and save me a spit load of time and energy.
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.
So what you're saying is, you blew the money-shot?
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.