Michael Arrington is never shy about his feelings. But this latest post on "operator-assisted" search engine ChaCha shows Mike in rare form.
Granted, ChaCha is a pretty dumb idea. In the never-ending quest to improve search, the team behind ChaCha thinks that human-assisted search is the way to go. Users submit a search to a search guide over a chat window. The search guide responds with results that are supposed to be better than those of Google.
Of course, hiring and paying search guides who are truly skilled searchers is neither cheap nor scalable. It's not a one-time investment, like the Mahalo Guides who build mini directory pages that can be viewed over and over. No, the model is like the old operator assisted telephone calls. There's a reason phone companies charged for operators. They're expensive. Of course, the cost may be going down. As TechCrunch notes, ChaCha has dropped from 24 million page views in January to only 2 million in October.
Here are Michael Arrington's comments verbatim:
The fact is, ChaCha is a bad idea that has been poorly executed. In a sea of dumb startup ideas, ChaCha stands apart as more awful than just about all of the rest. And that didn’t change with today’s funding news. They simply went from being a bad startup, to a well funded bad startup.
Ouch!
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