Search Briefs: Social Search from ChaCha; Brazil Judge Orders Google To Disclose Users’ Data
+ Brazil Judge Orders Google To Disclose Users’ Data (via Reuters)
See Also: Google’s Orkut Porn Headache (via Red Herring)
+ Another Day and Another Social Networking/Question Answering Service: ChaCha (via News.com)
It wasn’t long ago that attempting to get people interested in Wondir, a Q&A service, was a challenge. Now, it seems that a new Q&A services goes live daily. Today, it’s ChaCha. Microsoft launched their free QnA service last week.
ChaCha.com will pay “guides” up to $10 per hour spent searching for Web sites that contain answers to user questions. Guides invite other guides to the site and can then earn 10 percent of what the invited guides earn, said Brad Bostic, ChaCha.com president and co-founder.
ChaCha (it’s an Alpha release) offers two services.
1) “Cha Cha” search of a database of asked and answered questions.
2) “Search With A Guide”
Interactive chat similar to what many libraries offer. We couldn’t find info about the training and qualifications a question answerer gets. No mention on this about page.
Once again, a news story without any mention of library VR services. Oh, well.
UPDATE: See ResourceShelf’s Guide to Virtual Reference Services for Non-Librarians
September 4th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
[...] In another post today, we wrote about ChaCha, a new and free question and answering service. Unlike other services, ChaCha allows you to “chat live” with someone (we had issues learning the qualifications) to help answer your question(s). I used the service yesterday and my results were mediocre at best even with very basic reference queries. Since then the site has gone offline because of overwhelming demand. [...]
January 4th, 2008 at 2:42 am
[...] Human Powered Results: ChaCha Debuts Mobile Search via SMS Smart move by CC going mobile. When we first blogged about their web-based service (still available) we went on about how libraries offer the same type of [...]