Name as many search engines or web portals as you can in 30 seconds. Go! Oops. That one slipped out. First one is free. Google. Yahoo. MSN. Ask. About. Dogpile. Excite. Live Search. Mamma. Lycos. Alta Vista. Metacrawler. Searchmash. Snap. Baidu. Sohu. Rediff. Time’s up. Stop thinking and take your hands away from the keyboard. Let’s see what you came up with. Lots of good search engines on this list. I see you even went to China and India. Unless you are Data the android from Star Trek TNG, you wouldn’t have enough time to name all the search engines in the world. One of the newer search engines out there was documented in the fall of 2006 on Good Morning America. But that is not where I learned about this new search website.
When I first read about this search engine in Business 2.0 I thought that maybe I would like to be a part of this society. I can dedicate several hours per week helping people. But membership was by invitation only. So I emailed all of my friends and only got one reply asking “what is this?” Think of it as Google meets MySpace. The website Cha Cha is a search engine with a unique feature offered to the customer: human enabled help. Let’s say I wanted to find out some new recipes for making salad dressing or I needed to find the best way to advertise a car wash in the metro area. Normally I could use a basic search engine but for these niche searches, a human may be able to better help me build my search results. Cha Cha has a database which refines itself after every search so that the most relevant websites are the ones that come up first. When an “info seeker” wishes to get help from a person, he or she can click the button “Chat with a Live Guide.” Under perfect conditions, the information seeker (IS in Cha Cha lingo) will be connected with an expert in the field. But as they are still in the beta testing, sometimes you will get someone who is just marginal at browsing various search engines.
I’ve noticed that there are a lot of college students and stay at home moms on Cha Cha. This makes sense as they spend a lot of time at their computers. These lifestyles are not mandatory to be a good Cha Cha guide. If you have basic skills in typing, internet surfing and customer service, you may qualify as a guide. Guides usually like spending time helping people surf the internet for very little money. You will also need a computer and high speed internet. What kind of computer does a guide need? Currently if you are thinking about becoming a guide and you have a Mac, you better find a PC. The software needed to be a Cha Cha guide is only available for PC users. For this reason I doubt Apple will consider using Cha Cha in their Mac vs. PC commercials with Justin Long as a Mac and John Hodgman as a PC. Within the Cha Cha browser you can bookmark sites that you might commonly suggest to info seekers. There is also a timer to keep track of how long you have been searching. Each search pays for the first six minutes. After that you are basically working for the love of the internet. This prevents Guides from milking the clock to generate extra pennies on the dollar.
Guides are paid five dollars an hour (elite status earns ten dollars an hour) to help info seekers find websites that answer their question(s). To become a guide, you must be invited by another Cha Cha Guide. Guides have some previous experience with browsing the internet. They are also expected to be friendly and professional. Those who aren’t are weeded out. Now what if a guide cannot find what the info seeker is looking for? Then the info seeker would be asked if it is alright with him/ her to transfer to a new guide who may have more knowledge (or less since it is random selection) on the subject. This can happen frequently because if one cannot find information on another search engine sush as Yahoo or Ask, then the next thing to do is request the help of other human beings. Two brains are better than one in this instance. Just as there are good and bad guides, there are good and bad info seekers.
Right now Cha Cha is being bombarded by pranksters. These pranksters really aren’t searching for anything except how to waste their time and the time of other guides. They type in gibberish as the search word and try to ask guides personal questions. If pranksters are rude, the guide can click the ‘Report Abuse’ button and end the conversation at that point. Then the Info Seeker will be notified that their search has been terminated due to the content of the conversation and unfit search parameters. The company is currently working on better ways to filter prank searches. I usually ask some of the veterans who are high up on the Cha Cha totem pole how they handle pranksters. That is correct. There are different levels of guides. There are four levels within the Cha Cha community.
New members must read the manual and watch a training video when they are invited to start at the Apprentice level. If they do well with training then they are promoted to Pro and can start searching with live info seekers. If they continue to receive good ratings, then the guide will be promoted to Master. If one garners a lot great ratings in the beginning they can easily graduate to Master in the first week of searching. Most Cha Cha guides are at the master level. I heard from the forums that elite status is granted by keyword. Elite status varies by keyword and is always changing based on the top 20% of guides in the Cha Cha program. Master guides also have the power to send invitations to new applicants.
Within the referral program, Cha Cha has a 10% incentive program. All the guides in Cha Cha make 10% of what their referrals earn. So if I refer Johnny Mac and he makes $10, I make $1. Initially guides are granted eight invitations. Cha Cha will temporarily disable invitations from time to time to allow their current network to absorb all the searches. Currently as this article is being written, Cha Cha invitations are temporarily closed. Within the Cha Cha platform, each member can keep track of invites, and their network from their homepage.
Guides also track their earnings and earnings goals on their home page. The home page looks similar to Facebook, Myspace or any other similar community site you can think of. You can even have buddies post comments on your wall. The members have access to the Cha Cha forums where they try to figure out when Cha Cha will unblock invitations for new membership, or how many great ratings you need to get to the Elite level. There is also a store to buy mugs, shirts and other accessories with Cha Cha advertising. It is worth noting that Cha Cha has a good knowledge base linked to the home page to help guides become better at searching the internet for related queries.
When members first start out, they are allowed three key words max. These are the words that they will be trained on. When an info seeker is searching for something related to the key word, the guides will be notified. Therefore it is important for Guides to choose general key words to cover the most searches. As the guide gains more experience from searches, more keywords will be unlocked. Training is crucial because this is the time that the Trainer can answer any questions the trainee may have. The trainer gets paid as if this were a normal search. Trainees do not receive compensation for training sessions.
It is too early to tell whether Cha Cha will be a success or not. It depends on the quality of the Guides. Most guides I have interacted with were unable to help me search for what I was looking for. They tend to be too ignorant and don’t use the info seeker as a source of help to conduct the search. For example, I was looking for steel forging companies in Brazil. The guide directed me to a person’s resume that included the words forging and Brazil in it. Another guide was helping look for line charts for the New York Rangers. After he couldn’t find it I told him two websites where he could get the info. I asked him if he was a hockey fan and he said yes. I was disappointed that he could not find this basic information. But like in life, not everyone is as smart as they set out to be.
