ChaCha Blog

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.”