ChaCha: Social Search Dances for Big Money
January 27, 2009
About 2.5 hours north of the hollow where the Beyond Search goslings write Web log posts is Indianapolis, Indiana. A suburb of Indianapolis is Carmel, Indiana, population 40,000. Carmel has a search engine, and that search engine has “secured $11 million of a $30 million Series C round.” One of the investors is Bezos Expeditions which brushes up against Amazon. Good news for ChaCha.
ChaCha.com is a question-and-answer system. The company reports that it has three million people on record as having tried the system. In terms of traffic, here’s Google Trends for Yahoo.com, Ask.com, and ChaCha.com.
Here’s the interface:
To get the results, the user then creates an account shown below:
The company sends the activation code to a mobile phone. For me, the system reported unknown mobile device.
After working around that problem, the system did not have an answer to my question, “What is a Google Search Appliance?”
I have this company in my monitoring list. Right now, I don’t feel comfortable offering too many “from the hollow” comments. With more money, ChaCha.com should be able to raise its profile and demonstrate its business model to me.
Stephen Arnold, January 27, 2009
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2 Responses to “ChaCha: Social Search Dances for Big Money”
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Actually ChaCha is really all about mobile phones and it is the only thing all my friends and I use for search…..we love it!! Long live ChaCha!!
R Crider,
Would you not be even happier if you had a stake in the company?
Stephen Arnold, January 28, 2009