ChaCha Blog

As seems to be usual here at ChaCha, we’re taking a pretty unusual approach to generating traffic. You may remember when we launched Mission: ChaCha back in early January where we succeeded in launching in launching a first-of-its-kind marketing initiative encouraging our Guides to promote themselves (and us) by rewarding them for spreading the word in cash. Well we’ve expanded that program so that anyone can earn money by promoting ChaCha - you don’t even need to be a Guide.

ChaCha Agents get their own unique URL where people can begin to use ChaCha in a variety of ways. When they do, that Agent gets paid. Basically, if you have friends that need a better search engine, you can make money. It’s that easy. Click here to find out more about the program and about becoming a ChaCha Agent.

I also owe the blog a SXSW update, but I’m waiting on some pictures to accompany it.  (Long story.)

I’m currently in the Dallas airport en route to Austin to attend SXSW. I’ll be there until Tuesday morning and I’d love to meet up with anyone else who’s in attendance.

Hit me up on my Blackberry: justin.keller (at) chacha.com

Just a quick update:

Go here to the official Iditarod page and check in on how ChaCha the sled dog is doing.  Aily Zirkle is the name of the woman who is running her and it looks like right now she’s in 7th place out of forty sleds.

Go ChaCha!

I apologize! I’ve been a little delinquent in updating the ChaCha Blog. And not because nothing has happened, but because so much is happening we don’t have time to slow down. Let’s get caught up: Here’s what’s been going on and what people have been saying about us.

“Introducing ChaCha Search” from ClickZExperts

First, ClickZ is a great site. Second, they wrote a very nice article about us, and yet another person has positioned us as David to Google’s Goliath (heretoforth referred to as Googliath). ClickZ focuses a lot on Internet marketing and advertising, so they delve into our ad model and provide some good insight.

“There are additional benefits media buyers are sure to appreciate as well. Because search results are provided by human guides who are instructed never to return inappropriate results, advertisers needn’t worry about their ads being associated with negative content. The same can’t always be said for ad network or contextual advertising buys, which have on occasion aligned an advertiser with undesirable site content from mildly inconvenient to utterly appalling results.”

Click here to read the whole article.

“ChaCha: A Threat to Google?” from the IT-Director blog.

We’re often cited as being a “threat” to Google or as some other colorful adjective to Google. This gentleman, Robin Bloor, gives his reasons why he thinks that. I’m glad that people are already considering us to be “in the ring” with Google, but we’re just a baby and we have a long way to go before we can even hold a candle to them. I will say, however, that our growth has been much more accelerated and impressive than some of our competitors and we’re not even fully baked. This portends an great amount of success for us when all of our ducks are in a row and we’ve got everything we have planned executed.

“I used it for several days, and then, believe it or not, I gave up using Google. I’ll go to Google if ChaCha fails to find me what I want, but it hasn’t happened in a week.”

Click here to read the whole article.

“Ballmer Won’t iPhone Home” from eWeek

This article has nothing to do with us really. It’s really a vignette set to a Silicon Valley backdrop… with cats… Anyway, I won’t make you read the article (even though it’s quite entertaining). Here’s what they said about us:

The Furball fumbled with some finger food as another pal mentioned ChaCha.com, a search engine that recently received funding from Bezos Expeditions, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ personal investment firm. Touting itself as the first human-powered search engine, the site offers real-time search assistance from ChaCha personnel via instant messaging. “Mmm, why do I picture myself at 3 a.m. sending the ChaCha guide queries like ‘Are you alone’ and ‘What are you wearing?’ ” tittered the tipsy Tabby.

Click here to read the whole article.

“Going Beyond Google, With Guides” from Business 2.0

Last but not least, behold: Business 2.0. I’m a little extra-thrilled about this one because I’m a big fan of Business 2.0. Personal bias aside, this is probably the most interesting read of the lot. If you want to get a little peek into the future of ChaCha, download this PDF.

ChaCha.com recently sponsored a sled-dog whose name is, incidentally, ChaCha. She’s a five year old Uksi pup, mother of six, and she’s apparently really fast. Even though she’s smaller than the other dogs (she only weighs 40lbs), she’s more often than not leading the pack as she did when she finished the Iditarod last year. Her description says, “she’s very talented and has an ego to match… She’s a little girl with attitude.” Plus, she’s really cute as you can tell.

This coming weekend she’s racing the Kusko 300; a 300 mile race through the Alaskan mountain range near Denali. Then she’s racing the Iditarod Trail, which is a 1,149 miles long, this March. The picture of her to the right is from last year’s Iditarod after she had already completed 1,000 of those miles.

I’ll keep you posted on her, especially come March when she’s running the Iditarod. Go here to learn more about her and her teammates. Go here to learn about her owners and their Kennel.

Our much anticipated “walk up” CPC (Cost Per Click) ad service, ChaCha AdAgent, is now live in both ChaCha Search and Search With Guide. This service gives any visitor to our site the ability to run an advertising campaign on ChaCha by simply creating an account, inputting their credit card, creating a text-based ad, and choosing a category in which to run their ad. This is a performance-based advertising program that allows you to bid on your category so your ad is matched with your site to achieve the highest click-through rates. Not only are you optimizing your search, but ChaCha AdAgent is different than other CPC solutions because of our human touch. Our Guides will handpick which category a search belongs, and you gain the benefits of humans actually matching what people are really searching for. With a minimum of $25 and a bid-per-click of 25 cents, anyone can advertise. If you need to do some local advertising or some SEM, do it on a the most innovative and effective search engine out there.

It looks like we lit the fuse on Monday because things are starting to explode. Yesterday we were mentioned in some very reputable blogs and emagazines and today is even better! A few of the biggest blogs in the industry picked up on our press release yesterday, so be sure to read what the tech and business gurus are saying about us by clicking on the links below. But wait, there’s more! This morning our CEO went on CNBC to talk about ChaCha (which is why he isn’t pictured in the ChaCha Day photo below). We are also currently featured on Vator.tv, which is a really cool tech vlog site started by Bambi Francisco, mostly about silicon valley (or in our case, the silicon prairie).

Click right here to watch Scott on CNBC and right here to watch Scott and Brad on.

Finally, as promised, here is (most of) the ChaCha gang. They may, however, be easily mistaken for a game of checkers. David Gilby is conspicuously missing because he’s on the west coast but he did not want us to forget about him.

(click me to make me bigger!)

Today is a HUGE day for ChaCha for a couple of HUGE reasons.

Mission: ChaCha

The first piece of hugeness is our new marketing initiative called Mission: ChaCha. This is an unprecedented crack at spreading the word about ChaCha by compensating our Guides for promoting the ChaCha Toolbar. We’re going to pay them $1 per month for every person they get to fall in love with ChaCha by sending them the toolbar and making a consistent user out of them. It doesn’t stop there though: for the Guides that bring us the most ChaCha users we’re giving them equity in the company.

We’ve made new friends…

The other hugeness is that today we issued a press release announcing ChaCha’s completion of its second round of funding. Among the investors are Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com’s founder and CEO and Bezos Expeditions), Rod Canion (founding CEO of Compaq Computer), Jack Gill (silicon valley rockstar), and Don Aquilano (of Gazelle TechVentures).

Interesting thing about Jeff Bezos: he was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999 and this year Time’s Person of the year was YOU. You meaning those who contribute your interest, knowledge, and time to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. ChaCha is one of the most interesting and innovative companies to really leverage the Web 2.0 crowd (that’s my humble opinion, but I bet a few other people might agree with me). So I’m going to go ahead and say that we have two of Time Magazine’s persons of the year working for ChaCha’s benefit.

For these reasons, we’re going to officially declare January 8th “ChaCha Day”. Here in our little office we’ve got everyone in their ChaCha Gear. Look for a picture of the group later in the day.

Linkbacks…

We’re already getting a lot of buzz about our funding announcement. Here are a few of the places you can read about what people think, including Search Engine Land, which is Danny Sullivan’s blog. Keep checking back here as this list will be growing.

New York Times! We’re starting out 2007 with a bang. Yesterday we were featured on the front page of the business section in the New York Times in a piece about the Google competitors that are joining the fray to create a better search engine.

2006 was the cusp of what’s becoming a massive game of king of the hill in search. Whereas before it was a battle for industry domination (that could have been predicated more on branding than quality and satisfaction), it’s now clear who the Goliath is and countless startups are aiming their crosshairs at its weak spots.

We’re keeping our heads down, working continuously to improve ChaCha; working out bugs, perfecting the social functions, and making it better for our Guides to find the best information possible to garner our own story in the Times. As a point of reference, our Guides may want to check out some of the other engines mentioned in the article. I have and I think they do their thing better than Google- especially hakia. We’re just shy of being one year old (we’ve been live for exactly four months) and we’re already being considered competition for the big boys, so we must be on to something.

There is still a long way to go before we can even be considered underdogs, but one thing to extract from this article is that search is red hot right now and the playing field is rapidly expanding to accommodate more. All key information, entertainment, the economy, everything is migrating over to the Internet and search engines are THE portal into the digital world. Search engines are the funnel through which all information (and advertising revenue) are filtered. Esther Dyson had a nice, sobering quote about search engines in the article.

“There is way too much obsession with search, as if it were the end of the world,” said Esther Dyson, a well-known technology investor and forecaster. “Google equals money equals search equals search advertising; it all gets combined as if this is the last great business model.”

I was recently interviewed by Dave Raven of BFBS radio, which is a tech-centric internet radio show out of the UK. They’ve got a great program going on (which is why they featured us, right?) that you should check out by clicking right here.

This next one is from WOW Technology Minute . Do you have 60 seconds? Then listen to this. This is actually back from October when we only had 3,000 Guides, which is an amazing thing to say. 3,000 Guides is a large number but now we’re up around 25,000 Guides just over two months later. This is incredible growth and what’s even more incredible is that the traffic is growing along with it.

While we’re on the topic, you should also go to Danny Sullivan’s DailySearchCast regularly. They talked about us on their program several months ago (and hopefully we can get an interview with them soon, wink wink). Regardless of our presence on the program, it’s still great and full of terrific search-related content and Danny Sullivan is basically the Godfather of Search Engines.

Feed me more podcasts!