Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha

theodp writes "Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. The move was announced by new IU President Michael McRobbie, who until recently sat on ChaCha's Board of Directors (5-29 SEC filing, PDF). IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha, which IU notes is backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion."

AskJeeves2?

Does ChaCha have its own engine or does it rely on all the other ones? The "personal service" feature will die-off if enough people try to use it.

Re:AskJeeves2?

I'm imagining a bunch of "guides" searching Google for you instead of letting you do it yourself.

Seriously though, who knows? Maybe enough people suck at searching to make this service worthwhile, but I don't see how it could ever be profitable. Unless they somehow think they can get away without paying anybody.

Obligatory Beavis AND Butthead quote

Beavis: Diarrhea, ChaChaCha
Butthead: Diarrhea, ChaChaCha
Daria: You guys seriously need to get a life.

Re:

So what you're saying is, you blew the money-shot?

How does it differ from downloading term papers?

Seriously though, who knows? Maybe enough people suck at searching to make this service worthwhile

Given that much of modern intellectual life has degenerated into seeing who can come up with the best Google searches [or PubMed searches, or arXiv searches, or whatever], how does hiring someone to do your searching for you differ from hiring someone to write your term papers [google.com] for you?

Re:How does it differ from downloading term papers

"I'm pretty sure that nobody gets graded on how good their searches are."

Contrary to popular opinion a respectable degree does not simply cram as many facts into your head as will fit. A university degree is supposed to give one the skills to find known answers to a question, any question!

And quickly!

IU's guides could be asked to locate a building on campus, find a book in one of the university's libraries or solve a question about Windows Vista.

Hmmmm, free tech support! And we all know how well people doing tech support are treated.

Students, faculty and the public could ask the IU guides questions, said Brad Wheeler, IU's vice president for information technology. But he isn't worried about them getting overwhelmed. "If it ever became a huge problem, we can gate it," he said.

So, they stick a bunch of people with tech support responsibilities ... and when that bogs down they restrict the number of calls to them.

And yes, that is what will happen.

The only way this will survive is when the "support" people start telling their "customers" to purchase 3rd party software and such from companies that have purchased "ad time" on those "support" people.

"Hello, I'm running Windows Vista and it won't boot up."
"Have you tried the extreme refreshment of Mountain Dew? Many people who use Windows Vista prefer Mountain Dew."
"Will that help me fix Vista?"
"It might. It couldn't hurt. May I also recommend some Dominoes Pizza?"
"Thanks, I'm not hungry."
"Dominoes Pizza is having a special offer today on pepperoni pizzas."
"Okay, I'll order some pizza. How about my Vista problem?"
"Symantec sells a wide range of software products designed to facilitate and enrich your Vista experience."
click

Re:

What strikes me is the incredible hubris of the guy. He's abusing his position at the University for personal gain. He's drafting University employees to work for a venture that pays him money and pays them nothing. Must be nice. I wonder if the University

Big news ?

If they were forcing people to not use google search, that would be news. But who cares about this ?

Re:Big news ?

Um, maybe because public employees are being forced to donate labor toward a private company the university president has glaring conflict-of-interest ties with?

Other than that...

Re:

Um, maybe because public employees are being forced to donate labor toward a private company the university president has glaring conflict-of-interest ties with?

How does using this software to provide help to students and faculty constitute donating labor

Re:

How does using this software to provide help to students and faculty constitute donating labor to a private company?

Because it won't help students, it's just a ploy to keep a lame company afloat. If anything, it will hurt students and staff, as it takes tech support employees away from doing real work.

Re:

How does using this software to provide help to students and faculty constitute donating labor to a private company?

The summary says, "IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha"

Basically, u

Re:

Or maybe people should go back to the root of the word and spell it 'cheque' (like everywhere else outside of the U.S.A.) instead of spelling foe-net-ti-clee. :)

Re:

What's your problem?

Did someone tell you to expect a check but didn't warn you that you had to deposit it with a bank in order to use it? [ubuntuforums.org]

Besides, you are a fine one to be bitching that the meaning of a word has changed due to popular usage. [slashdot.org]

Re:

It's impossible that he served on the board and made the deal with the company because he believes in the product?

Re:

That's fine, but what is not fine is him making decisions in a position of power at IU that have a direct financial effect on a company he still likely receives payment in some form from. That is about as close to conflict of interest as you can get.

Re:Big news ?

Because no one leaves the Board of a Directors of a company that they think is going to be successful and does a HUGE favor like this, and receives nothing in the end. Since they are not a publicly traded company, their financials don't have to be disclosed either, so no one has any way of verifying this without some sort of official investigation. Even without direct proof, it is still a huge conflict of interest in mine, and many other people's opinions.

Re:

Because no one leaves the Board of a Directors of a company that they think is going to be successful and does a HUGE favor like this, and receives nothing in the end. Since they are not a publicly traded company, their financials don't have to be disclose

Re:

There's nothing in the actual FACTS presented that represents a conflict of interest. You (and many other people) may wish to presume that there is a conflict of interest, and hence corruption, involved; but it's still nothing more than presumption.

Yeah, because corrupt individuals always just come out and tell you that they're corrupt. Happens all the time on your planet I'm sure.

As a matter of principle, I choose to presume innocence until there is evidence of guilt; as that is the presumption that I wish others to make when viewing my actions.

Good luck with that.

What an amazing coincidence.

For the former president of a company to be so prescient so as to recognize ChaCha's innate superiority to the number one worldwide search engine.

I honestly didn't know anyone used ChaCha for anything besides screwing with the people. There have been epic forum threads based on ChaCha.

Re:

Seriously, it seems like a major conflict of interest. Why is the president of the University making decisions like this anyway?

Obligatory thedailywtf link

It appears ChaCha is Very Quality [worsethanfailure.com]

It reminds me of one of failed DotBomb era projects.

sponsored links

chacha mixes sponsored links, see ADVERTISMENTS, in with valid matches. they can fuck off and die.

anyone else notice that the format is exactly like googles?

I was a ChaCha guide...

Only thing ChaCha is really useful over Google is for the 'epic lulz'. Messing with ChaCha guides is amazing, and I bet the university will stop using ChaCha guided searches when a bunch of students start asking for pictures of lemonparty. Hint: they couldn't actually ban someone from the service last I checked. ;)

why?

I'm puzzled by the benefits of this. IU, like other large establishments, sets up web pages and other tools so that instead of needing to have humans answer questions, computers can index things.
This article cites the benefits of having a human guide such as

"IU's guides could be asked to locate a building on campus", (use a campus map)

"find a book in one of the university's libraries" (use a library web page)or

"solve a question about Windows Vista (use Microsoft s knowledge base)".

Then IU does the asinine thing of replacing search results compiled by google appliances with human filtered ones. How much revenue does this give to cha-cha?

Woo hoo, the Orange Catholic Search Engine!

It's like I always say, "Why can't the world be more like a Frank Herbert novel."

Well actually, not always. But once, in my head, while typing. I didn't give much thought to punctuation, though.

Re:

Suddenly, I want a "This site is powered by MENTATS " badge for my website. (It's a terrible strain on their wrists to put out the pages live like that, but they're very highly trained.)

They could save a ton of money.

Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha.

If they took a page (ahem!) out of Google's book and used pigeons [google.com] instead.

Cha Cha Ching

for ChaCha

Yahoo - again after ?? a decade

Wasn't this how Yahoo started - people searching for good information on the Internet and making it available on web pages.

Me thinks, this ChaCha may become a very big yawn after a short while && AI search optimization may be the future. Google and

Re:

Yahoo was a directory, like a yellow pages. Chacha is search combined with chat. If you can't find something you will talk to a real person.

meanwhile on an obscure website at the end of the

Googlebotter: It's people. IU Search is made out of people. They're making their index out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding them like cattle for links. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!

Slashdotter: I promise, bottie, I promise. I'll tell the geeks.

Googlebotter: You tell everybody. Listen to me, Slashdotter. You've gotta tell them! IU search is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!

Why something like ChaCha will never thrive

http://xkcd.net/155/ [xkcd.net]

Link should speak for itself.

ChaCha founder is an IU grad

The only reason why IU is interested in ChaCha is because it was started by Scott A. Jones [wikipedia.org] who is an IU grad (and also the founder of Gracenote).

The thought of making library and tech support people essentially chacha employees is a bit disturbing but

What's next?

Former CEO of some defense company becomes Secretary of Defense and approves multi-billion dollar contract to that company?

I can't blame them...

As a new IU student, let me say this can't hurt. This isn't too surprising to me, while google is great for getting valuable search results from gobs of pages, it really hasn't been designed or optimized to work with few pages. The IU results with the google search are so irrelevant they are worthless. This isn't a troll, I use google for web searches, but try it yourself here [indiana.edu] and search for course offerings, or course catalog, or list of courses. Garbage results mostly. I found the same was true of the BYU search--it was google and it was terrible.

The summary sounds like there is a conflict of interest for sure, so I can't say ChaCha was the right replacement (ads mixed with search results?!? sounds evil to me). But I can say a replacement/fix/something had to be done.

Re:I can't blame them...

As speaking from Columbus next door, IUPUC has its head stuck up their asses when it comes to IU mandate.

Back in 2001, we had 350 MHz machines with 128 and 256 MB. They mandated us with a switch from NT4 (which worked great and kept games and crap off) to 2000. Slow-city. A year and a half later, we were mandated for XP. For the same FARKING machines.

They also had serious problems with Windows Messenger spam coming from within the IU network. Of course, the drop-dead easy solution of turning off Windows Messenger service was too above their comprehension to do.

Next, the uni uses ADS and Kerberos for auth. IUPUC auths with ads.iupui.edu over a T-1. Guess what happens when you flood the T-1? Nobody logs in. I tried to tell them, but they learned the hard way when a bunch of techies from the IU side kazaa-ed the T-1 down. Heads rolled, and they finally took my suggestion: dont disable local guest or admin. Just password them heavily in that authorized people could still use the doorstops... computers.

Pretty much, you end up with "If you cant do, teach. If you cant teach, work in IT."

Coming from a CompSci dropout. Chem is better by far.

And a side note: No wonder they fired the old IU president. Guess the old one wouldnt take kickbacks.

3 strikes

I'd never heard of ChaCha. I just did a search for the first time and noticed that 1) sponsored results are inline and poorly marked (there's some suble green "sponsored by" text within an otherwise ordinary looking search result). That might have been forgiven, but 2) the sponsored results for this particular query weren't actually very relevant. Then, when I tried to click through a real result I found that 3) they use javascript for their result links, and it's implemented in such a way that I can't command-click on a result and open it in a new tab (it does open in a new tab, but the original tab loads the result page, too).

I won't be back.

Clich here to report conflict of interest

To report a conflict of interest involving an employee of the State of Indiana, click here. [in.gov]

Relevant documents:

• Indiana University Conflict of Interest Policy [indiana.edu]
• Indiana Code, "Bribery, Conflict of Interest, and Official Misconduct" [in.gov]

To be fair, it's two different search problems

Intranets and The Internet are two different beasts when it comes to search. Intranet pages are much more tightly controlled, the set of all pages is quite sparse, and the "importance" of a page doesn't necessarily correspond to its value as a search result. PageRank (even tuned for these conditions) just isn't as effective as it is on the public Internet; you want to tune search results for each organization based on how people actually use their intranet. I think the Google Search Appliance actually does this (refining the order of its results based on clickthroughs) but I'm unsure.

In my company (a very big and globe-spanning one), our intranet search is more-or-less useless. However, many people use an internal social bookmarking application. Searching this set of links is leaps and bounds more useful, and tends to return the result I'm looking for in the first half of the first page. A lot of these links are on obscure little pages hidden away on our massive intranet, which describe, say, how to fill out a massive form the right way, or how to hack around a particular quirk in our IT infrastructure. In other words, things that employees think are important, rather than things that management thinks are important.

Which is not to say that I think ChaCha at IU is a good thing. By all accounts this situation sounds like a terrible conflict of interest. However, I don't think that simply pointing Google at your organization's intranet is going to solve all your problems; instead, you want a smart blend of automated page ranking and social filtering to get around the problems caused by the (relatively) smaller sample set.

Re:

Ever been to Bloomington? It's a pretty beautiful place. Most of the cities in the US (NYC especially) were built out of Limestone from the surrounding quarries. Beautiful limestone hills, tons of wildlife, lakes, trees, fields, flowers etc.. It also h

Re:

I'll take Indiana over 95% of the rest of the USA. It's a beautiful place to live, especially in the south. Rolling hills, forests, lakes, caves, wildlife, it beats the city any day.

Re:

What does a Gnome icon theme have to do with Latin American dances or search engines? Now I'm thoroughly confused.

Re:

What does a Gnome icon theme have to do with Latin American dances or search engines?

The same thing that network file systems have to do with Samba, I think.

Re:

It does look like a conflict of interest here but I guess there's none at IU with the balls to go up against the new IU President. Next thing you know, he's going to force everyone to use Windows Vista along with Microsoft Office 2007. Oh, and collect a ni

Re:

At least google gets the answer to the most important question in the world [google.ca] right. It IS "42"!

Re:

What exactly is revolutionary about their "vision" of search? They have guided searches? Great, so I can get someone who probably is dumber than I am to search the web for me, and then give the results back to me. Not to mention their non-guided searche

Re:

No, that doesn't suffice for me, and I'm willing to bet all the other /.'ers that are belittling this company. They have no signs that tell you that they are working on this new bad ass searching technology, and try to get people to focus on this gimmick

Re:

ChaCha is based in Indiana (Carmel, to be exact). It's just the a state government's natural prejudice towards putting money back into the state economy. That could be one of the reasons IU has switched to it, given that it's a public university. By the w