ChaCha.com The Newest Fad or an Up and Coming Search Engine

In the last years there has been more than an abundance of fads from clothing to toys and even websites. There have been websites hitting the Internet like 4chan.com and 1-am-bored.com, which both for an instantaneous moment were very popular, but there has not been many search engines that have been released to the public in the last few years, especially ones that cater to the public like one of the youngest search engine out there does.

ChaCha.com is a live search engine, yes you heard me right, live, and there are actually people that you ask to search for your information. No more scouring the Internet for hours to get that thesis written for class last minute, what an ingenious idea, this website sounded like it would hit big as soon as it was released. This brilliant idea was brought you to by the all around person Scott Jones, who a few years back Scott created the voice-mail system that is now used by nearly all telephone companies around the globe. Pretty good for being 40 years old and living in a huge house in Indiana, he has many projects that he as been associated with other than the voice mail and now ChaCha.com he was also involved in contributing. Scott, like many other inventors came up with this idea of ChaCha after looking for hours for some information on google, he thought it would be a great idea if there was a live search engine and from their Scott's vision became reality.

Since the search engine site has started taking queries, however it has had a meager showing of hits to the site this week at just under nineteen thousand hits per day average making them very low on the Alexia score compared to their competition, no where matching there competition of ask's daily hits of over half a million or google's million plus. Scott Jones has a thought that they are not going to advertise this site keeping the costs down and letting the guides get more money, when signing on as a guides for chacha it is advised that they will be paid per searching how anywhere for $5.00 to $10.00 based on what their ratings are. Most guides do not see anywhere nears this amount I was told by a anonymous source who wishes to remain in the shadows for fear of loosing this contract with ChaCha if their name is released, "Most of the time I make, when I am lucky a $1.00 an hour sitting on the computer for hours at end."

ChaCha was released in a beta version July 2006 to the public and 10,000 guides, since that time the site has had several face lifts and also changes to the programs that the guides use to assist in searching. Now I am told the number of guides is somewhere in the 36,000 range, most of these being stay at home moms and college students. One guide tells me that, "ChaCha has seen a lot of changes since I started with the company back in 2006, and some changes have been great and have hindered pranksters from wasting our time. However, some of the changes, well we wonder why they were done. The last thing ChaCha did was change their homepage where it used to give the option to search with a guide or alone as soon as you came onto the site. Now you have to search alone in order to even get an option to search with one of us. I haven't had a search in hours at this point and since they did this change many people have been leaving. Ever day I see less and less searches, I wonder if ChaCha is going to last the month sometimes."

In a previous interview Scott mentioned that he is in hopes that by the year 2010 that his company will overtake the current 411 company, making it one of the largest searching resources in the world. By the looks of this site so far Scott and his guides have a long way to go before competitors like google and 411 have to worry about being pushed out of their spots, just like most things, time will tell what ChaCha's future will be.