Can ChaCha's Humans Compete with Google's Algorithms?

In 2006, Scott A. Jones co-founded ChaCha.com, a search engine that uses human guides to answer queries. Now they're expanding to the mobile space, allowing users to call or text their nuanced questions in plain English, and receive succinct answers in minutes. But with the amount of data on the Web growing exponentially, are human beings really the best tools for trolling it all? FastCompany.com sat down with Jones, also the co-founder of Gracenote and a voicemail pioneer, to talk about the future of mobile search, the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence, and why he doesn't fear Google.

The amount of data online is growing, but more and more people are trying to access it on small-screen mobile devices. How will that alter the way search is performed?

Well, in order for search to be effective on phones, we're going to have to dig through more data, but the results will also need to get more and more specific. Other companies like Google, Yahoo, and Ask are struggling to do that -- to come up with deep, rich, succinct content from their searches. They're having problems, because it's not like algorithmic searches are always going to give you a relevant result as the first, second, or third thing on the page.

What's so bad about having the user do her own filtering?

I think that in many situations, having human mediation is key. Especially when the mediation is from people who know something about whatever you're asking - sports, entertainment, medicine - because they can sort through search results at their desktop, and get you back succinct answers very quickly at moments when you need them most. Those are what I call the "peak demand" moments. Right now, when you need something on the run, you don't want to mess with your smart phone's browser. So what do you do? You call or text your friends, so they can point you in the right direction. That behavior is already there, so it's my gut feeling that because of the way technology is trending, humans need to be in this loop for a while.

So Cha-Cha is actually better suited for mobile phones than for computers?

We knew that it would be better for phones from the beginning, but we knew we had to build out our backend first. Twenty years ago I was working on voicemail technology, and I had science fiction ideas about the future of phones: that, for example, there would be a small phone in my ear that could access The Library of Congress - this was before the Internet -- and also have access to practical information, like the best restaurant in town, and even which waitress to ask for while there. That's the idea behind ChaCha.

What about searching outside of the "peak demand" moment? Why do we still need human mediation in those searches?

Before giving a speech at the National Academy of Sciences a few years ago, I was on Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia, searching for information on what new technology was coming out, trying to prepare what I would say. I called my friends at Sequoia, my CTO, my other friends, and they'd always give me answers that sent me back to the Web. That was the "aha!" moment: What if I could do that across all topics? That would be a hugely powerful thing. I was still thinking of this in terms of mobile phones, but we started at the desktop version first to figure out the taxonomy of managing our guides. In fact, most of our 25 patents are about managing the human army of guides, not about spiders or indexing.

Do you really have thousands of people out there waiting to respond to my search query?

We've had 40,000 guides -- maybe 50,000 -- come through our system, and they come from all walks of life. Some are college students, some are work-at-home moms, retired librarians, people who like Jeopardy, people who like working on Wikipedia. Some people do it for the money, others do it to help the online community, and some do it to learn more about a topic they're interested in. To become a guide, there are some basic requirements, and they have to take a test online. They login online to take the tests, which take a few hours, and within a day they can be online and active.

You've announced that soon these guides will be able to accept not only SMS queries, but voice queries as well. In a world where most voice-activated systems are mediocre at best, is voice-powered search really viable?