IU's Choice of Search Engine ChaCha "Explained"

theodp sends a follow-up to the discussion here a couple of months back about Indiana University librarians and students being forced to use the 'human-powered' ChaCha search engine because IU's President and one of its Trustees were business buddies of ChaCha CEO (and IU alum) Scott Jones. Don't be ridiculous, insisted indignant IU officials. It was ChaCha's ability to fill in gaps in a speech he was writing in 2007 that convinced IU's CIO that the University had to do a deal with ChaCha. What a coincidence, notes Valleywag. The need to fill in gaps in a speech he was writing back in 2005 is what convinced ChaCha CEO Jones that he had to create ChaCha in the first place. Way to anticipate what your customers need before they do.

what's the suprise?

Why is this kind of behavior a suprise to anyone? It happens in every business, big or small, for profit and non-profit, and today, colleges are nothing more than big businesses driven by athletics. Its typical hypocricy, all the while the executives spout

Re:what's the suprise?

I don't get this kind of post. It seems to be saying "big deal, everybody does that, why did this even get posted?"

While I'm not surprised at all this sort of thing happens this IMO doesn't mean it shouldn't be reported on. Maybe then it'll happen a bit less often.

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I don't think it is just about businesses and organizations. Possibly everyone does it. It's all part of social networking, we all get and grant favors to people we know that we wouldn't grant to people we don't know, even if it's for favors that shouldn

Driven by athletics?

I agree they are no different then any other buisness, but athletics? I dont see that being the case.

Sure its a factor from a marketing perspective, but i dont see it being the big money maker for them. Its number of students that makes the $. Many school

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There's no surprise involved. Cockroaches don't like light, and the internet is a great way to shine it on them.

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There's no surprise involved. Cockroaches don't like light, and the internet is a great way to shine it on them.

Although in this case the light is a spotlight of free publicity. I've never even heard of Cha Cha and I went and checked them out just for grins because of this article.

Also to comment on this 'new' type of search engine: A people driven search engine

What the ... ?

He was impressed when IU's Ask a Librarian service found the quote, from former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, within hours. But a ChaCha guide got it in two minutes.

"Hours".

So he wasted at least TWO HOURS of someone's time looking up a quote? For a SPEECH? And then he asked a DIFFERENT person to look it up, also?

Re:What the ... ?

Welcome to the world of the modern CEO (which the president of a university effectively is). Other's time is worth nothing compared to your time - both figuratively and nearly literally for some CEOs. Sadly, it probably wasn't even a good speech - they rarely are.

That's the point. The waste.

This guy is so bad that he wastes HOURS of other people's time on researching his speech.

So that would immediately call into question any of his decisions. He is not capable of determining whether ChaCha is better than Google (or better than just looking i

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This guy is so bad that he wastes HOURS of other people's time on researching his speech.

That depends how much he is paying them - if someone were to pay me $100/hour to look up cheesy phrases for their speech, I'd be quite happy to do it. If they're payin

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Flipping burgers pays that bad in USA ? I was thinking you guys have minimum-wage laws at around $10 ? Granted, even that is hardly enough for a reasonable standard of living, even with a fulltime job, but oh well.

Flipping burgers in Stavanger pays ~$15-20

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Flipping burgers in Stavanger pays ~$15-20/hour.

There are probably locales in the U.S. that pay about that, other factors taken into consideration. I'm sure there are some places that pay minimum wage, but they probably can't attract workers. The last t

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That low ? $5.85/hour means that if you work 8hr/day, 22 days a month that's aproximately how many workdays there are a month, on average, your gross earnings will be $1000 dollars. That's -gross- mind you, I don't know what the net will be, but it'll be l

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This discussion comes up every now again on Slashdot, especially when comparing the cost of living between the West Coast (Seattle, Los Angeles), the East Coast (New York, Boston, Washington D.C), the South/Central (Dallas, Austin) and everywhere else.

Mini

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Thank you. +1 Informative.

It's interesting to compare. One thing that strikes me is, in general people say USA have low taxation, whereas for example Norway has high taxes.

But that completely fails to be the case for the lower classes, infact the oposite i

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So what? How many CEOs figure they could just as easily step right in and teach the engineers how to get things done, and probably do it better, if they could just take the time from their ever so much more important duties? This even though they have no i

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I guess the guy in ChaCha used Google and the others were too dumb to do that.

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He was impressed when IU's Ask a Librarian service found the quote, from former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, within hours.

So he wasted at least TWO HOURS of someone's time looking up a quote?

I'm replying to your post two hours after you made it. Even though I'm responding "within hours", do you think I spent two hours writing this?

What!?

I thought ChaCha's only reason to exist was so you could abuse the people who help you search!

twilight zone

I ran a search for "serving ferrets", when asked if I needed feeding them, I responded with "not so much" and had my session ended by the ChaCha Guide almost instantly.

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I remember listening to a friend's comedy CD, I think it was Howard Stern, and the guy on it was making a prank call to a car-cleaning place, and he was asking questions like:

"Okay, now, do you guys clean the whole car? Like in the trunk and everything?"

"

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Sounds like Tom Mabe http://www.tommabe.com/ [tommabe.com]
He has a couple cds of pranking telemarketers. I know he has one call about a rug cleaning company and him asking about getting blood out of the carpet.

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Yeah, I think that's it. I do remember initially thinking it was Howard Stern. Also, it was so funny I was laughing uncontrollably for a few minutes.

Thanks for the name and link :-)

Conflict of Interest

I cannot see any way that someone could make a defensible argument for a University forcing its students to use a particular search engine. It's just braindead. When the person making the decision is a director of (or anyone with a significant stake in) the company benefitting, it goes beyond being stupid and irresponsible and becomes corrupt.

How does IU pull this off, anyway? Do they actually block Google, Yahoo, etc?

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Just a guess: If you currently do a search at the University of Indiana [indiana.edu], the results [iu.edu] are Powered by Google Search Appliance. Sounds like they'll switch to ChaCha for intranet searching.

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No, when you search there are a few different engines listed with radio buttons to choose. ChaCha is selected by default. Google is right next to it.

Re:Conflict of Interest

I work At IU, it is actually just replacing the search engine on the site www.iu.edu, it was/is google. No one is being forced at all to use it, in fact most users have google for their homepage. Now they can use a special version of cha cha on the IU homepage that is supported by the Library staff and lab consultants. It will also give special access to the library's periodicals and other online documents if a student is logged in. To be honest I think they will still be using google hardware for some searches.

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Mod parent up. This is just IU using Chacha to power its own internal search portal [slashdot.org], and forcing its employees to be unpaid volunteers for Chacha. Nobody's stopping students from using GOOG or anything else for their general web searches. RTFPR [iu.edu] for more

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You say its boneheaded and a conflict of interest but dont want people to exaggerate it into something its not, you yourself are underexaggerating the case. IU gets public money and as a result of the deal with ChaCha, is essentially funding ChaCha like i

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Huh? Which part of my post are you supposed to be disagreeing with? I'm saying it's misleading and exaggerated to claim, as the writeup does, that IU students are being forced to use Chacha. As you correctly point out, there's plenty else wrong with wha

All the silly names made me laugh

I just looked at the article, and I honestly couldn't get past the Cha Cha part. I mean, who seriously make anything called "Cha Cha" that isn't some sort of dog food or diapers for crippled canines. They should fire that guy just for doing that, even if

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Yeah, why name it something moronic like "Cha Cha" when you could name it something sophisticated and professional like "Yahoo!" or "Google".

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Don't forget Dogpile and AskJeeves (isn't that vaguely languagecist (yeah, just made that word up, live with it)?).

Internet search engines have weird names...

Re:All the silly names made me laugh

I don't see what's so silly about it. My friend Joanie loves Cha Cha.

Thank god for Google - I had no idea how to spell Joanie.

-J

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Well, according to their website, Cha is Chinese for "search." So unlike, say, Google or Yahoo!, the word has relevance to searching.

I think the best part is that ChaCha uses Google ads on its results page.

Ah-ha!

I was wondering where Jeeve's went after leaving Ask. Apparently he changed his freakin' name to ChaCha.

It's a blatant conflict of interest

McRobbie should have been eliminated from his assension to IU president, which happens on Oct 18, for tepid ethics.

Whatever the quality of ChaCha, it's not right for him to be on their board, then use IU student resources as well as IU assets to forward this. Jones, inventor of voice mail, needs no free ride from anyone.

Indiana politics smells as bad as politics anywhere, but this is far too close of a relationship, and McRobbie sees nothing wrong with his forceful advocacy of ChaCha. Sure, you can use google or anything you want. But using university resources towards personal profit in this way is onerous and not transparent.

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You're entitled to your opinions. Not your facts.

1) McRobbie was indeed compensated; you think he did ChaCha for free?
2) Of course not; he's not President until Oct 18th. Nah, just another university official (as interim) doing the wrong thing
3) Two wrongs

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Good.

Now, let's get an audit for full exposure and transparency. Then let's recind this relationship so as to for once and all remove all possible taints, and use an arms-length method to employ this dictum on IU's campuses.

1) I don't believe IU, and this

Here then....

Since you don't like my vocabulary and apparently are missing my message, let me take something from Scott Jones' own web site. I'll annotate. Viz:

>> An Indianapolis technology business and Indiana University have announced a partnership.

Ok, there's

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At best, it's a wicked procedural and PR gaffe. At worst, it's much worse than that.

Vetting the situation requires, unfortunately for Jones and McRobbie, startling clarity and an ugly audit. Provided brilliant-- no, crystaline-- results, subsequent dicta n

In MySpace...

... no one can hear you ChaChaCha.

Snark?

That was "sarcasm". Look it up.

You might also want to look up the real meaning of "snark" while you're at it.
 

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I did look it up. 'Speech or writing loosely characterized as "snidely derisive."' That's what it was.

And while a sufficiently permissive definition of "sarcasm" might include that statement, it really was nothing remotely like good sarcasm.

Re:"Way to anticipate what your customers need"

"Way to add distracting snark. Face it, you're not John Stewart."

Well, to be fair, Jon Stewart's not even John Stewart!

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Joke's on you -- you probably only caught that mistake because of the amazing power of ChaCha.

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I was wondering why OP was talking about the Green Lantern.

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15 minutes -- "Chat session ended" -- zero search results
on qalqashandi sub al-a'sha manuscript location

Cairo, Egypt would be a good start.
(If you know what library, please reply; thanks!)

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I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you spelled it wrong. I'm pretty sure that it's spelled Subh Al-a'sha and is written by Qalqashanda. When looking for something like that spelling matters.

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Cairo, Egypt would be a good start.
(If you know what library, please reply; thanks!)

It's at the Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyyah [unesco.org], which looks like this [mit.edu].

/. FTW!