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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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.