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IU's Choice of Search Engine ChaCha "Explained"
theodp sends a follow-up to the discussion here a couple of months back about Indiana University librarians and students being forced to use the 'human-powered' ChaCha search engine because IU's President and one of its Trustees were business buddies of ChaCha CEO (and IU alum) Scott Jones. Don't be ridiculous, insisted indignant IU officials. It was ChaCha's ability to fill in gaps in a speech he was writing in 2007 that convinced IU's CIO that the University had to do a deal with ChaCha. What a coincidence, notes Valleywag. The need to fill in gaps in a speech he was writing back in 2005 is what convinced ChaCha CEO Jones that he had to create ChaCha in the first place. Way to anticipate what your customers need before they do.
Way to add distracting snark. Face it, you're not John Stewart.
I have some gaps in my brain. Will it fill in those too?
Why is this kind of behavior a suprise to anyone? It happens in every business, big or small, for profit and non-profit, and today, colleges are nothing more than big businesses driven by athletics. Its typical hypocricy, all the while the executives spout off about ethics they openly ignore them. The moral of this is to never believe a thing that rolls downhill, whether from executives, politicians, rock stars or otherwise; and instead to remember that the basic truth is that the importance of adherence to lofty ethics for the most part, is dependent upon who you are.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
"Hours".
So he wasted at least TWO HOURS of someone's time looking up a quote? For a SPEECH? And then he asked a DIFFERENT person to look it up, also?
I thought ChaCha's only reason to exist was so you could abuse the people who help you search!
I cannot see any way that someone could make a defensible argument for a University forcing its students to use a particular search engine. It's just braindead. When the person making the decision is a director of (or anyone with a significant stake in) the company benefitting, it goes beyond being stupid and irresponsible and becomes corrupt.
How does IU pull this off, anyway? Do they actually block Google, Yahoo, etc?
How were they forced? There are so many search engines out there, it's hard to imagine blocking *all* of them and *all* the proxies you could use to get to them.
TFA doesn't explain. Something doesn't add up.
It's still there buddy.
Always observing your bathroom breaks and reporting them to third parties behind your back.
I just looked at the article, and I honestly couldn't get past the Cha Cha part. I mean, who seriously make anything called "Cha Cha" that isn't some sort of dog food or diapers for crippled canines. They should fire that guy just for doing that, even if he didn't own a piece of it.
This is my sig.
This guy is so bad that he wastes HOURS of other people's time on researching his speech.
So that would immediately call into question any of his decisions. He is not capable of determining whether ChaCha is better than Google (or better than just looking it up in the library yourself).
Obligatory car analogy -
If you never drive a car, are you capable of saying Car A is better than Car B based solely upon how fast someone else can pick up your laundry in it?
The search box on http://www.iu.edu/ answers with a "Powered by Google Search Appliance", no Cha-Cha ;-(
I was wondering where Jeeve's went after leaving Ask. Apparently he changed his freakin' name to ChaCha.
Oh, for the days when sig's didn't have to be cute...hey, wait a sec.
Cha-Cha is the sound of diarrhea. Indiana is gay for naming their search engine so gayly.
Indiana still has "libraries"
That was "sarcasm". Look it up.
You might also want to look up the real meaning of "snark" while you're at it.
Deleted
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/chachacom-get-people.php?page=10
...
HatfulOfHollow posted:
Status: Looking for a guide
Status: Connected to guide: BarbaraB
BarbaraB: Hi there. I will be helping with your search.
You: hello brabarab!
BarbaraB: HI! What can I find you today?
You: i need information about bank robberies
BarbaraB: general info?
You: yes
You: but also some more specific stuff
BarbaraB: Like what?
You: like great bank robberies or robberies in general
You: where the criminals got away
You: oh thats a good link
You: but is there any more speciic information about any of those particular robberies?
You: yes! bank robberies unsolved!
You: that's amazing
BarbaraB: Can I find anything else for you?
You: how about robberies of bank robberies gone wrong?
You: err links for robberies gone wrong
BarbaraB: sure, one moment
You: like remember that one in california a few years ago where the guys had body armor on and got killed?
You: i need more info about things like that.
You: oh wow, that last link is awesome
You: it even goes into the details of what the peeople did when they robbed the banks
BarbaraB: Interesting....
You: this is all great info
You: oh man!
You: i like that last one. philly's greatest bank robbery
BarbaraB: Can I find anything else for you?
You: yeah, actually
BarbaraB: Let me have it......
You: can you find me the addresses of banks in philadelphia.
BarbaraB: LOL
You: no, really.
BarbaraB: No really, LOL.
You: i'm just trying to learn through other peoples mistakes
BarbaraB: Can I find anything else for you?
You: nope that's it!
BarbaraB: Thanks for searching ChaCha!
I agree they are no different then any other buisness, but athletics? I dont see that being the case.
Sure its a factor from a marketing perspective, but i dont see it being the big money maker for them. Its number of students that makes the $. Many schools where their athletic programs are nil still rake in the students/profits.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
on a ChaCha query ... 5 minutes so far ...
qalqashandi sub al-a'sha manuscript location
Mod parent to the sky, good people, mod parent to the sky.
I ran a search for "serving ferrets", when asked if I needed feeding them, I responded with "not so much" and had my session ended by the ChaCha Guide almost instantly.
what a bunch of evil scumbags
so much for capitalism or free enterprise
What do you mean "forced"?
:-/
Do you mean to suggest that IU students cannot access other search engines?
I know it happens in Australia (land of the dreaded monopoly-telco Telstra),
but, surely, in a civilised uni, one should be free to use any Search Engine!
Maybe IU [& other US universities] need[s] Psiphon...?
McRobbie should have been eliminated from his assension to IU president, which happens on Oct 18, for tepid ethics.
Whatever the quality of ChaCha, it's not right for him to be on their board, then use IU student resources as well as IU assets to forward this. Jones, inventor of voice mail, needs no free ride from anyone.
Indiana politics smells as bad as politics anywhere, but this is far too close of a relationship, and McRobbie sees nothing wrong with his forceful advocacy of ChaCha. Sure, you can use google or anything you want. But using university resources towards personal profit in this way is onerous and not transparent.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I suspect it is not just about business relationships, if you have direct access to student search history you can aggregate a great deal of intellectual property before anyone else. You could even patent an invention or move on an idea before the students themselves, for example.
What else would you expect from a company which pays a pittance to its employees (only they aren't of course, otherwise it would no doubt break a few labout laws). From a quick look round the net being a guide for Cha Cha appears to be a job which requires skill, pays you only when questions are asked (so you can be sitting about idle and unpaid), and even then only pays at a rate below just about any western minimum wage. If these guides were sitting at home waiting for deliveries of buttons to sew for a few pence a time there would be a documentary being made about how evil their bosses are. How dumb (or desperate) are people to be cha cha guides? Much of the internet relies on people gifting their services (e.g. the advice available on this site and forums throughout the net) for a variety of reasons (they like to help, they know they'll get advice/help in return later). Cha Cha is taking that positive environment and trying to extract a profit from other people's goodwill. Many of the guides probably enjoy giving advice and would be doing something similar on other sites so a few beans in payment seems like a good deal. But do we really want to go down this road? Some people are always looking to extract money from the work of others - do the right thing and ignore Cha Cha!
Look at being a guide as something you do for a couple hours at night before you go to bed instead of a job. You can make a few hundred dollars a month just being on the computer doing what you normally would otherwise.
I would say BIAS alert, since my mother was a lawyer responsible for the startup of ChaCha and she actually showed it to me when it was in venture capital mode and you needed a password to access it... but I guess my statement really has nothing to do with any of that.
I live in a place where those who live forever come to die.
McRobbie has no equity or compensation from ChaCha, and never did. ChaCha is simply enhancing what IU has already been doing for years - providing students with direct access to experts online. Pretty cool stuff.
The synopsis looked a little bit too ridiculous to believe, so I Googled "indiana university search engine". It looks possible that "the ChaCha infrastructure" is not entirely without merit. Other things being equal (that is, assuming that their IT department doesn't totally suck eggs), their press release gives the impression that information that has not yet been uploaded will become more quickly digitized, the next time each resource is requested. Of course, that's the description from the parties who have a vested interest in making it sound good. But it is apparent that electronic search capabilities have been augmented by, not replaced by, human librarian expertise. I hope the Union of
How will this partnership benefit the IU academic community?
Every time a guide answers a question, the answer will be added to the search system, building a base of knowledge from which others can draw. The ability to repurpose this accumulated knowledge extends what is currently available at Indiana University and offers a valuable new service to the academic community.
www.indiana.edu/~ovpit/presentations/ChaCha/ChaCha_IU_FAQ_080607.doc
If it seems to good to be true, it is.
The converse is also true, with a few hilarious exceptions.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
... no one can hear you ChaChaCha.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Since you don't like my vocabulary and apparently are missing my message, let me take something from Scott Jones' own web site. I'll annotate. Viz:
>> An Indianapolis technology business and Indiana University have announced a partnership.
Ok, there's a partnership. See the next sentence.
>> The partnership will use IU's library and information technology staff in a Carmel-based Internet search engine that uses experts as "guides" through techniques including instant messaging.
Uh, let's see. IU's library and information technology staff.... and who is paying for this? Indianatax payers? Those with fealty to the bursars of IU? Guides cost money.
>> When IU students and faculty use the service, IU guides will be vetting and voting upon the instant search results, constantly improving them. Guides will also available for information seekers' interaction via live chat.
Nothing like letting people do research with IU guides to vet and vote. After all, librarians do that. And the IT staff do that... right?
>> Scott A. Jones, founder of the ChaCha search engine, and Brad Wheeler, Indiana University vice president for information technology, made the announcement. Jones is the inventor of key parts of voice-mail technology.
As ValleyWag and others cite, Wheeler works for McRobbie, or perhaps Dr Garland Elmore and McRobbie. Elmore would seem above this fray.
>> The alliance is one of several partnerships Michael McRobbie, IU president, intends to make with Indiana-based businesses to promote economic and technological growth in the state.
Alliances are great, and they are key. Good for McRobbie. Good for IU. Good for their students, who are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries.
>> McRobbie resigned from the board of directors of ChaCha before taking office July 1. He resigned from that position when he was named IU president so as not to have any conflicts of interest, said Lauren Kinzler of Dittoe Public Relations.
Ah, here's the truck I have with the entire matter. All of the aforementioned came when McRobbie, who very unlikely worked for ChaCha as a director for FREE, through his obvious and tacit approval didn't dismiss, or disapprove of this relationship between IU and ChaCha, and therefore it lacks transparency. To summarize my truck: he worked for ChaCha as a director, and then after becoming president-elect, quits ChaCha, and then this policy and university resources policy comes birthed from the ether.
Not.
I don't believe McRobbie was a direct beneficiary of a bribe, direct (W-2 or 1099) pay, stock asset value amplification scheme from Jones or any theory like that. Instead, there's a situation that looks very much like quid pro quo. McRobbie is a director of Jones' startup- ChaCha, resigns handily, and suddenly IU's using an unproven engine while utilizing university assets and resources backing it. Hmmmmm. We won't even look at other ChaCha directors becoming involved in IU's leadership.
Powerless indeed. How presumptive. It leads me to believe that you believe yourself to be, or might actually be in a position of power at IU. If you are, then your defense of this abrogation of ethics as I see it demands openness and transparency that this matter does not have.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Scotss started Escient LLC in Indy with his voicemail booty. Sponsored a competitiveness group for Indiana, yet Escient was well known for low pay and excessive hours. Did the whole Gracenote/CDDB takeover of a free and public information system and turned it into a copyrighted, for profit, mess.
Yup - Scott Jones is all about himself.