I saw on Tech Crunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/chacha-ditches-guided-search-model-i-love-to-hate-this-startup/ that ChaCha was ditching its guided search. This is something we predicted would happen and here is part of an article written by BKI Media published in December 2007.

ChaCha was co-founded by Scott A. Jones and Brad A. Bostic in 2006. Mr Jones is the inventor of the voicemail system used by nearly a half billion people worldwide, who was able to “retire” at 31 and go on and invent things like Gracenote which allows you to see what’s on a CD in iTunes etc. Mr Bostic has led a number of unspecified start-ups. 

Unfortunately, ChaCha is more of a bum note. The plan is that consumers’ queries are answered, free of charge, either by a user texting their query to 242242 (ChaCha) from within the US or online at www.chacha.com. If you choose the mobile approach, your query is always addressed by a “guide”, that is, a human researcher who provides the answer plus the web page/source of the information. This is also known as social searching.

The website gives you the option of searching yourself or asking a guide to help. Users aren’t obliged to register for a free account, but they have to if they want help from a guide and if they do so, their search mobile and online search history is saved, in theory speeding up future answers. (I tried asking how much it would cost to send the SMS and also if the service is available anywhere in the world, but kept being told I couldn’t register because I got the Turing-type numbers wrong, which I hadn’t. I had four failed attempts in all.)

Ultimately the plan is that users can call ChaCha and ask a question, a guide will listen to that question, find and type the answer, then send it through a text-to-speech program. ChaCha’s system will call the user back and relay the answer in a recorded computer voice, which of course often might be very helpful for someone on a mobile, for instance, if they are driving. 

Also, this is a much, much better bet for answers than the other way round (speech-to-text, which is fraught with problems, as anyone who has ever tried to use SpinVox will know), but it doesn’t get over the hurdle of the guides, which are central to the entire proposition. 

Guides work from their own PCs at home. SMS guides are paid USD 0.20 per transaction while online guides are paid USD5 per search hour. They can be paid via a debit card through First Internet Bank of Indiana, or by direct deposit to be paid once a month if their earn USD 100 or more. That’s certainly going to take some doing on the SMS front.

Who guides the guides? 

Much depends on how well trained the guides are (which for the tiny amounts they are being paid seems to be asking a lot) at using the tools that ChaCha claims to have that enables them to provide better, faster responses than the ordinary searcher. To up the ante, guides are also ‘categorised’ and allocated to certain queries, apparently, according to what their areas of personal expertise are and they have access to each other for help.

However, there are rumours that 90% of all queries are spoofs by pranksters and apocryphal-sounding tales of clueless guides abound (Guide in response to a query: What’s Digg?, for instance). It is thought ChaCha has around 12,000 guides on their books, although there are no set minimum hours.

Arguably the service isn’t aimed at the tech savvy and early adopters, but people who can’t easily navigate the web on their own or who want information on the hoof and can’t cope with mobile search themselves. Still, the calamitous decline in usage over the course of last year suggests that it hasn’t got the offer right for anyone. It surely isn’t any faster or easier texting ChaCha a question such as “What time does XX close on a Wednesday?” than phoning XX to find out?

Flawed business case

The user experience is fraught with difficulties, but so is the business model, which relies on advertising for its revenue, providing the service to users free of charge. Again, it’s hard to see how the Comscore figures are going to tempt big brands to part with wads of cash, especially as ChaCha is becoming something of a laughing stock amongst the cognoscenti.

Another big challenge, both in terms of attracting mobile users and advertisers, is that it’s off-deck – carriers haven’t exactly been queuing up to put it on their portals. The company is hoping to raise its profile at the forthcoming Sundance Film Festival which opens on 17th January in Park City, Utah in the US. At the event, ChaCha will send out droves of scouts to compile real-time information on the films and event, then send it to ChaCha guides who can answer questions from festival attendees walking around the venue. Last May, ChaCha announced a partnership with blinkx to facilitate video search, which might have a role to play at Sundance. In the longer term, we cannot see that Sundance will save it though.

(To read the conclusion - please email me).