Sometimes the search goes awry

You know you’re dealing with a beta site when you keep typing questions into a chat box and the person on the other end has disappeared.

That’s what happened when we recently tested the freshly launched “new” search site ChaCha ( www.chacha.com).

You can do ordinary searches there. But the intriguing difference at ChaCha is the option of asking a live person – a “guide” – to respond and generate an answer or set of links. Sounds nice … sort of like answers.google.com, with a live person dealing with your question.

So far, since this site is in beta, the search is free.

Here’s how my maiden search by guide went. I logged in and popped this question: “Where do I find hidden treasure in the Northwest.”

Message came back: “Connected to guide HeatherM.” Followed by the obligatory “Welcome to ChaCha!”

Cool. My next question was just: “I’m checking in … how live are you?”

Reply: “Im alive!”

Me: “If I use your service, what’s the cost?” Answer came back it was free.

So then I went right to the question: “How do I find the best resources to find treasure in the Northwest. Exclude Alaska … don’t like the weather this time of year.”

HeatherM grew mysteriously silent. Five minutes go by and no reply.

Me: “Hello???? Anyone there?”

Again, nada.

Me: “I can’t see you, Heather. Can you see that I’m still here?”

Ten minutes later… nothing. Why did I continue trying? Well, the chat box for ChaCha has a “guide session” bar above the text area. And the bar in that session indicates some kind of activity is transpiring.

Maybe HeatherM got a better offer. I assume the guides are being recruited with some form of payment. It must have been obvious to HeatherM that our effort wasn’t going to lead to a solid payoff.

Or else she found an answer so revealing that off she went, headed for treasure in the deep canyons of central Oregon or somewhere.

A company ChaCha blog – blog.chacha.com – reads: “ChaCha is no longer a small search engine run by a few people in Indiana; we have a huge community of enthusiastic Guides committed to making it succeed and a team of wonderful and intelligent people back at ChaCha HQ working around the clock constantly tweaking and improving it. We’re continually breaking our own traffic records and are already seeing more traffic than some popular and established search engines. After a tremendous amount of work and patience by everyone it’s finally ready to take on the world.”