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

There are actually multiple layers of problems you'd have to solve to make voice-powered search work: the first is speech recognition. Even the most advanced speech recognition software in the world requires correction of every fourth or fifth word. Sure, you can do some special tricks, give the system a limited vocabulary -- but if you try to do a generalized search it just doesn't work. The second layer of problems involves natural language recognition. Even if your system can understand the words you're saying, it won't necessarily get the syntax; now the question becomes, "What's actually being said?" The final piece of the problem is the algorithmic issue: We need to get to a place where we're coming up with half a page of results instead of two million. The algorithmic problem is far from being solved, and the big guys don't really know how to do it any better than they're doing it now.

Of course, the easiest way to solve problems one and two is to take them out of the equation completely -- and we do that by using people. We have a bunch of different types of guides; if you call in to ChaCha, you get sent to a transcriber, who transcribes what you've asked and sends it to an ambassador guide. That ambassador triages that query, checks if the question has been asked before, and if it hasn't, sends it off to a specialist, generalist, or expert. The ambassador tees up the question that way, as if it's a game of volleyball -- pitching this query around, and trying to get the best answer for you. And it all happens in a couple of minutes.

So the ambassador can access a database of previously asked questions? Do you hope that eventually the top questions will fill your database and make your guides' responses faster?

As the databases of questions grow, those databases will definitely assist our guides with finding answers more rapidly. On the backside, we have a mechanism that enables expert guides to go through various answers to one question and decide which are best -- those "best" answers will appear higher in their results. That's actually better than simple crowd wisdom because the best answer is picked by an expert.

Sounds like you must like the idea behind Mahalo, then?

There are lots of ways to apply people to search, and Mahalo is going for the short tail of queries - the most common ones. That's a good direction, if Google lets them get there. Who knows, maybe Mahalo is a place that we ought to be sending people to with some of our reference links. Maybe there's a partnership brewing. I view most of the other guys as potential partners.

Does that mean you don't fear Google?

They do some things really well. Take Google Mobile: It's good for simple questions like sports and weather; even if it can't give you much depth in its answers, it's very fast. I actually think there's an opportunity to partner with, or be on the shoulders of, the other big search engines. The founders of Google fundamentally believe in using algorithms over people, so we don't really compete with them ideologically.

How will ChaCha draw revenue? Can you do targeted advertising via SMS and not annoy your users?

I don't know that our users would see targeted SMS advertising as benign, and right now I'm experimenting with different payloads for delivering ads. I'm not happy with them yet. There are several places to put that extra ad message - in a separate text message, at the end of your answer, or on the page you access with the reference link you get at the end of your text. We will choose the method that is least offensive.

Our best idea for a solution is to send out ads so targeted and local that they'll be viewed as a positive part of the search result. To do that, we intend to leverage our human knowledge at choosing ads as well.