Have You Heard About ChaCha?

ChaCha (chacha.com) is a human powered search engine. If you're not sure what that means exactly, let me explain a bit. ChaCha provides the American population with answers to all their lingering questions, in a sense. Say for example, you are in New York and you want to know what time it is in Athens, ChaCha will give you the answer. This is how it works. The "infoseeker" (you) send a text message from your cellular phone to 242242 (chacha on most phone keypads) or call 1-800-2chacha. Someone, somewhere in America receives the text or voice message with your question and formats it into an easy to read question and sends it on to a "guide" (the human searcher). The guide then searches the Internet from their home computer somewhere in America, finds the answer and sends it to you in a text message. Now you know that if it is 11:15 p.m. in New York then it is 6:15 a.m. in Athens. Yes it is as simple as that.

Now you are probably asking yourself, okay that seems easy enough, but how much does it cost. For you, it costs nothing, zip, zero, zilch, other than any standard voice or text charges your cellular carrier may charge, but these days you probably have unlimited text messages anyway. ChaCha makes money from advertisers, not unlike most online search engines, the only difference is that ChaCha's ad campaigns are carried out via text message instead of pop up ads or text ads on the side of your Internet browser.

So ChaCha gives you answers to your questions free of charge, but do they pay the people finding the answers, you bet they do. ChaCha "contractors" do not make much, and of late the pay structure has changed dramatically. There are three types of contractors working for ChaCha to make this work. First is the "Expeditor" who receives the text message that you send and categorizes it and sends it on to the "Guides" who find the answers and send them to you via text message. Second is the "Transcriber" who listens to the voice message that you leave and transcribes it into text then sends it on to the "Expeditor" who categorizes it and sends it on to the "Guide" who finds the answer and sends it to you via text message. Third is the "Guide".

The Transcribers and Expeditors receive $.02 for each message that they relay, whether it is typing out the voice message or categorizing the text message, they earn the same amount for every "query". The Guides make a little more because they do more work, searching the Internet and coming up with an answer from a reputable source, they make either $.10 or $.20 for each query. ChaCha has developed a pay for performance strategy for paying guides, if a guide answers at least 200 questions in a week and has a 95% or higher accuracy rate (based on a statistical sample of each Guides answers) then they are qualified as "Top Guides" and earn $.20 per query, otherwise they only receive $.10.

Anyone working for ChaCha in any of these capacities will never make much and could not live a comfortable lifestyle with this as an only source of income, but you will find that a lot of stay at home moms and students are the ones participating. If you devote a fair amount of time to it and get the coveted Top Guide status then one could make several hundred dollars per week, about the same as a part time minimum wage job, the benefit being of course that you get to stay at home and set your own hours.

Overall, it seems like a good idea, the only problem I can foresee is advertising dollars slowing in the present economy, but for now ChaCha seems to be doing just fine, recently acquiring advertising from the Obama campaign, among other high profile companies.

Go ahead and try it out, send a text message or call right now and see what kind of answer you get. They will provide you with stock prices, sports scores, even jokes. I asked them what is Christina Aguilera's birthday and got a detailed answer in about two minutes. Try it and leave a comment if you like letting everyone know how it went.