Could ChaCha Slowly Sink to the Bottom?

Many people would agree that ChaCha is coming to the end of its short lived run. Never heard of ChaCha; let's start from the beginning.

ChaCha is a human-powered search engine. You can text from your mobile phone, any question you have, such as "What's the weather for Miami, Florida on Saturday and Sunday?" or "Give me the directions to North Brunswick, New Jersey to Newark, New Jersey." Just about any question you can think of, you can ask. There is also a number you can call where you just state your question and hang up. After a short period of time, usually after five minutes, you will receive a text message from a ChaCha Guide with the answer to your question. Sounds great, right? What if you are lost and need directions but can't look them up from your phone? Just text ChaCha your current location, where you are trying to go, and a Guide can help you. ChaCha is a free service but if you do not have a text messaging plan on your cell phone plan, then your mobile carrier can charge you a text message fee. This probably makes ChaCha sound even more appealing. So how could ChaCha possibly be heading downhill?

One of the main problems is that ChaCha is being abused by pranksters. Guides are always receiving queries that are extremely inappropriate or that lead to website that have viruses on them. I spoke with a Guide on the queries they received. "Some queries are unbelievable. People ask us to send them pornography or dirty text messages and they even send us dirty text messages. First, we are not a pornography website, nor do we offer any type of sexual services. Second, these could be underage children texting in. It's quite repulsive." What is ChaCha doing to help this issue? "Nothing at the moment. They claim they are working on a system that we can choose what type of questions we will receive. There is an abuse button that you can press to cancel the session but it just tells the info seeker that their question is inappropriate. I see a lot of times that they continue to send the same disgusting questions or statements until someone answers."

The Guide also mentioned that the most recent risky move ChaCha made was dropping the pay rates for Guides. Guides just starting out only make $.15 per search and master Guides make $.20 per search. These rates are changing August 14^th to $.10 per search, unless they reach Top Guide status. "To be a Top Guide for the week you have to complete over 300 queries and have an accuracy rating of 95% or more. I am a stay at home mother with two young children and a husband to feed. 300 queries may not sound a lot, but more than 60% of the time, the ChaCha system is either down or so slow you cannot complete any queries. I can only spend so much time on ChaCha seeing as how I do have a family to take care of. So now, my $.20 per search will drop to $.10 unless I can reach Top Guide. If I do, amazingly, reach that status, then the next week I will make $.20. If I fail to reach Top Guide that week, then I am back to the lousy $.10 per search. It's very frustrating for a lot of us Guides who do ChaCha from home, on our own time, to bring in extra cash for the month. I personally believe ChaCha needs to better their system and create a way for us Guides to view our accuracy ratings, that way we know what we need to work on." ChaCha claims they are dropping the pay rates to eliminate the Guides who are only doing a semi-good job or aren't taking it seriously enough to perform at their best.

ChaCha is still new and has a lot of work to do to compete with the top search engines such as Google. The Guide I spoke with also mentioned that a lot of other Guides will be striking against ChaCha and will not do any queries on certain days. Could this be the end of ChaCha? Will they lose their most important customers; the employees?