Mr Hat's house of knowledge

Maybe not the brightest idea I've ever heard

When my brother Matias showed me ChaCha.com a search engine that features, wait for it.....Actual human beings! I must admit I was genuinely intrigued. Who are these "guides" and are they any good? These guys are guys like you and me that get paid $5 an hour and NO, they are not any good. I can’t blame them for doing exactly what I would do which is directing people to wikipedia, but c’mon is not like wikipedia is an obscure internet resource. When they can't direct you to the most obviously generic site, they start the trial and error process which consists in linking you to the most random pages hoping one of them contains the information you were looking for. Not the best use for your time we all know that Google didn’t become a verb by linking people to garbage. But hey, some people miss the human touch and I understand that (I also prefer cuddly humans) but human contact with strangers over the internet whether is via a webcam in a porn site or a yahoo chat its always going to be handicapped. Like I mentioned before my brother showed me the website, he also told me that some of his queries included the telephone number for the Cuban police, the cure for loneliness and if the Cola Wars were an actual war. Yes the questions are absurd and yes the Cha Cha guides spent time answering them. Now multiply these questions by the thousands that decided to play pranks on these poor guys and you will realize that these guys won't have that much time left to answer the REAL questions which might deride in them finding the easiest way out of the queries by....linking you to wikipedia! I assume this site wants to support itself via advertising, who are they gonna target? The way I see it, since as a search engine is useless, because of it’s off the chart ability to entertainingly waste your time and already a hit among the internet savvy teenage demographic (as early adopters huge among advertisers) Cha-Cha is the new you tube. Heck if I had any money I'd buy some stock.

Posted by Mr Hat on Monday, December 11, 2006 at 7:38 PM | Permalink