JMH Techtronics

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction
II. Press Releases and Articles
III. New ChaCha Front Page “Enhancements” Scam
IV. Pay Me Now Fees Scam
V. Working for Free and Deactivations
VI. ChaCha Archives

ChaCha is a live guide powered search database. Guides work for less than minimum wage online and find information for people too lazy to look for themselves, or entertain pranksters who have nothing else to do.

This is the page where searchers start out at. The ChaCha home page. It used to be that when an searcher (infoseeker as ChaCha calls them) came to that page they had the option of doing a regular search, or search with a Live Guide right away. Considering that ChaCha is promoted as a Live Guide search engine you would assume that it would be best to keep the home page just as it was. Apparently ChaCha saw some opportunity to give guides less money though by using the complaints about ChaCha Pranksters to make some changes.

Now if you are to go to the home search page they have taken the Live Guide button completely away. Now you must do a regular search even before you have the option of using a Live Guide. This isn’t something new. They tried this before. It’s one of their better pay scams.

Supposing you are an infoseeker and you come to ChaCha to find some information you have to do a normal search first. Since the database that ChaCha has put together for any particular search turns up the worst results on the internet for any search engine you would most likely find nothing of use. So why exactly would you even bother then? Google actually gives you relevant results. You just wasted your time with this whole thing if you decided that you were going to try ChaCha.

How does this effect live guides? This is a very simple answer. With that button gone on the first page they get less live searches, and in turn aren’t able to make as much money while they are sitting at their computers waiting for searches. Even the most supportive guides of Chacha can see that this is really taking their chance to make money away.

ChaCha though has tried to use the psychology of words to announce this to guides. Since so many complain about ChaCha Pranksters, ChaCha is telling the live guides that this front page “Enhancement” has been done simply to limit them from getting through. These live guides are supposed to believe that this is going to be a benefit to them. They will get less pranksters. I’m sure most of you reading this have enough common sense to understand that this will have completely the opposite effect. ChaCha Pranksters aren’t there to find information. They are there to cause trouble. Having to enter something that gets around whatever system they have in place to stop them from getting in is what they do. This doesn’t deter pranksters. This deters people that actually want to use a live guide for legitimate reasons and in turn lowers the number of searches that guides come upon in a given day.

It didn’t take most very long to figure out what ChaCha is doing here. It didn’t take them long to see the decrease in searches either. The consensus is that ChaCha is trying to phase them out. ChaCha had them build this “social search engine” and fill the database with results and eventually they will no longer need the guides. This is how it looks to guides, and how it would look to most other observers of the situation. It is called the “People Powered Search”. Apparently that means people are filling up the database for them now, and not actually helping infoseekers in chat sessions.

Guides have been filling the system with results for months. All these results were gathered from various other search engines. ChaCha is not a search engine by definition. They don’t scour the web and index information themselves like the others do. The guides actually put the results into the system by hand. Was this Chacha’s plan all along? Get the database filled by what essentially are Beta Testers to a point that it is partially accurate and up to date and then phase out a large group of the guide population?

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Filed under: ChaCha, Computers and Internet by JMH

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