If Search Engines Could Talk: ChaCha - The Friendly Search Engine

I recently had a conversation with the newly launched techno-human hybrid chat search engine, ChaCha. For those not familiar with ChaCha, this engine uses human researchers in a side chat interface as a live search engine results page is built before your eyes. My purpose was to test a search funnel process over several keywords and phrases to see if the guide would lead me to a satisfying result.

"StephenD" was my live human guide who built the search engine results page by reformulating my query information, and his real screen name was changed for this article. Casual punctuation and capitalization was also changed.

I've since conducted a few other ChaCha searches, mostly when I've hit a dead end on a hard-to-find search. Even though the editors are not always topic experts, they have been able to build a result set that offered some level of satisfaction, though it takes some time to build manually. I also had to feed the live guide a lot of information.

Update by Sunny: So is ChaCha the Google killer? I wouldn't bet on it, but I would bet that they find a niche in the market with a loyal user base, and that we may see more innovation from them to come in the form of user interface, and/or behavioral research. For Google, this might be the next level of Search : )