ChaCha Blog

If you pay attention to any search engine news, you’ll have noticed that a new one seems to pop up everyday. Most of these new takes on Internet search either claim that their engine can understand you better, searches more, or searches better. Usually confluent with these are new interfaces, extra tabs, pulldown menus (read: things that complicate search).

Here’s a screenshot from Webcrawler.com eleven years ago. This was the first search engine I had ever used and, though I was very young, it was very intuitive to me. If you replace that spider with a Google logo it’s almost the same exact thing one decade and billions of dollars later. Despite the countless iterations that seem to pop up everyday, offering access to niche resources or algorithms that hone in on the exact results you want, the search heavyweights have adhered to the principle of making search as simple as possible. For example, Google now has twenty-six search tabs that are never used. Rather than give users all these searching options, Google has implemented “invisible tabs” that automaticaly use these refining search options to help you find your search because, as the patent says, “a large majority of users tend to ignore the category tabs.”

There’s been a recent flurry of press and advertising for Ask.com, the rebranded and retweaked AskJeeves.com. The ads focus on Ask.com understanding the user better - when you search for “pimped out cars” you also get results on “phat” and “tight” cars.” This is only a slight departure from Ask Jeeve’s concept of having users input full sentences into their search bar, which really didn’t work too well. In fact, even the most advanced systems can’t disambiguate many sentences, so it was smart for Ask Jeeves to drop that angle when they rebranded. Not only because the system couldn’t do it, but it was also too little too late. People have become accustomed to talking to search engines. Ask.com’s rebranding has made their algorithms better at understanding your words, but it hasn’t made it better at actually “hearing” you.

It’s often said that Natural Language Processing is the key to dethroning Google but effective NLP has been sought since the beginning and has yet to be achieved. Back in 1995 Excite launched touting their “intelligent concept extraction” which is a fancy way of knowing what concepts were related to other concepts. Then came Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves wasn’t the first company to offer natural language searching, but they marketed themselves on the ability to enter your query in a full, human sentence. Then a handful of natural language search engines that never took off popped up and never caught on. Even Microsoft toyed with the idea of linguistic analysis. None of these really made a dent, so how could natural language be the way forward? Because a majority of people don’t know how to make a search engine hear them and a lot of times people want just one answer for just one question. Ultimately, it’s a way of making search even more simple. Search is trending toward ultra-simplicity while digging deeper and more accurately, which is exactly what ChaCha.com has been able to do.

We didn’t want to design a machine that could understand you, we wanted to find a way to connect you with a person who can. We’re able to understand what you’re looking for and search literally thousands of resources for you. We log the resources used and the results that were delivered and turn them right back around to augment our algorithmic search engine so that it will ultimately be better at understanding you and provide better results than any other engine out there.

Come to ChaCha. Enter your question. Talk to someone about your question. Get your answer. You don’t have to do any of the legwork. I often compare the benefits of ChaCha, even to “power searches,” to that of going into a record store. You may be an expert on knowing which record stores to go to, how their inventories are arranged, but say you wanted to find a new jazz record- something you’ve never heard before. What do you do? You go to the clerk of the record store and tell him what you’re into, you talk about the different nuances of what you’re looking for, and he hopefuly hooks you up with a record you’ll really like.

I’ve actually received a query like this before. Someone wanted to know some good music to fall asleep to, so rather than searching through a bunch of resources on the internet I opened my extensive MP3 collection and started scanning through for the best drowsy tunes I had and then links where they could go hear some of it. It’s this human element, the abillity to connect to someone who has a different insight into things, that is at the core of ChaCha.